4

By Chris Meadows

spam_1 Since last night, we have been deluged by around a thousand spam comments from a particularly persistent free-iPhone-site spammer. At 20 comments per page, that’s a lot of spam to go through for false positives!

In that light, it is entirely possible that some comments, including lengthier ones, may accidentally be passed over and lost during our trawl to clear the spam out of our trap. If you post a comment that does not show up on the site for several hours—especially if it was a longer one, mentioned sales or had several URLs in it, or comes from the one or two TeleRead commenters who know that our spamtrap just doesn’t like them for some reason)—it may have been accidentally deleted in which case you will need to re-post it.

I would encourage you to copy and save the text of longer comments into a notepad file against the possibility of that happening, at least until we can deal with the deluge. We care a great deal about our comments, and do our best to rescue every mistakenly-trapped from one the spamtrap, but when this much junk hits our filters at once it becomes much more likely we’ll miss some.

(And as a reminder, first posts from new commenters are directed to a separate moderation queue, which we also check several times a day. If you’ve never made a comment before, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t show up until we can approve it, but it most assuredly hasn’t been lost or buried in spam.)

Thank you for your patience.

Update: Paul has located a WordPress plugin that can block by IP address. It seems to be working so far!

 
4