I began to notice that my blog comments were not posting on the blogs that I visited.
I went through a series of excuses in my mind after each failure to post my finely crafted comment. I thought;
- What a lame website
- Did I click cancel instead of submit?
- Is CoComment “doing something” here?
- Is one of my 40+ FIrefox plugins playing tricks on me?
- Wait a minute something is going on here
Maybe I am being viewed as a low life spammer.
Where is the trouble?
I knew that quite a few of the recent blogs I visited were WordPress blogs, so I focused there. I thought a Blogger blog gave the same trouble, but wasn’t sure.
Contacting WordPress Blog Owners
I began contacting blog owners vie email, twitter or whatever I could find. All replied. But the puzzle wasn’t becoming clearer to me. Mostly I just received confirmation that they saw no comment.
A friend suggested that maybe Akismet was invovled. Hmmm. Akismet is the blog spam solution that is provided in WordPress. The parent company of WordPress and Akismet is Automattic.
Akismet could be working with only the limited set of information that I as a commenter provided, such as;
- My local IP address
- My email address
- My website address
- My name
- My comment
To test my theory and reduce the number of factors I left two comments on www.digiphile.com. The first comment was made with my customary information. The second was made with a diffferent name, website, email and comment.
The first comment was not published and the second was published right away. I asked Alex to see if the first comment was marked as spam and it was. He was kind enough to publish both comments.
This proved that it was not the IP address that was being caught by Akismet.
The Solution
I visited www.akismet.com and poked around a bit until I landed on their Contact page, which was very revealing.
The Contact page has a paragraph explaining why the form does not use Akismet. The reason is that inhocent people contact them about being caught and marked as spam by Akismet. If Akismet was running on the form, those messages would not get through resulting in very poor customer service.
This was encouraging. I left a short message explaining my plight. The following day I received a message from Akismet support apologizing for the problem and telling me that the problem is now fixed. Yippee.
Contact Akismet Support
If your blog comments are not posting, check and see if they are being marked as spam by Akismet. If they are, just fill out this form http://akismet.com/contact/ and if you are inhocent you will get a pleasant reply in short order. Mine was within 24 hours.
Have your comments been disappearing on you?
