A number of ProBlogger readers have been emailing me of late to say that comments that they are leaving here are not appearing and that it seems they are being marked as spam incorrectly.
I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Due to the thousands of spam comments that they filter each day it was impossible for me to scan through them all looking for such mistakes.
If your comments have been filtered out in this way could you please let me know. I just noticed that Akismet have added a search function which allows me to search for email addresses, URLs, names etc. Of course I need to know what I’m looking for – so if your comments are being filtered here please contact me with the name, email address and URL that you use in comments and I’ll look for them and mark them as ‘not spam’ which hopefully will fix the issue.
Feel free to test whether you’re being marked as spam by leaving a comment below.
I’m not sure when the search functionality was added to Akismet (it could have been there for weeks as I’m not one for details) but it’s a welcome feature!
update: I should also mention that in addition to Akismet I also have some manual moderation to do – particularly for first time commenters who all go into the queue for my manual moderation. So if this is your first comment it doesn’t mean you are being filtered as spam. If in doubt – contact me.
