Comments routinely end up in the spam filter on this blog and I thought I’d explain.

I use the Askismet filter to catch spam comments. This is from their site:

“Automatic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.”

And…


How does it work?

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The comments people leave actually go through their screening process and are filtered against criteria determined by hundreds or thousands (maybe more) of blogs. It is decidedly NOT personal.

What I do, is run through the stuff caught in the filter and look for legitimate comments. I do this periodically throughout the day. I do not do this is in the middle of the night.

I recover most the comments but admit that I occasionally delete one accidentally due being in a hurry or because I just didn’t see it. Keep in mind I wake up to a hundred spam comments each morning – (get several hundred a day) so when I running through the pages of them it is possible to scroll past a comment. It is never intentional, it is just sometimes I wake up to “overwhelm” and am capable of human failure.

I hope this reassures everyone. Why your comment winds up in the trash when it never did before is a mystery to me. The filter does this and overall the filter is VERY GOOD. First I could not live without but also it is about 1 comment in every 50 or 75 that winds up in there by accident which shows not only how effective it is but also how badly I need it.