TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

By Chris Meadows

Just a reminder that we’ve got a spamtrap in effect because we receive literally hundreds of spam comments per day. They range from the generic (umpteen zillion ways to say, “Your blog is awesome! I totally agree with everything you have to say. You are such a good writer to know how to make your points so clearly!”) to the strange (the person who claimed to be held prisoner by the Irish mafia who were making him post spam for a Christmas website) to just plain garbage.

Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous and swallow legitimate comments (due to some arcane combination of keywords or alignment of stars or something), but we check the spamtrap several times per day. As long as we don’t get deluged again we should be all right to find false positives sooner or later. (Unfortunately, they will usually get posted in the order in which they were received, which means if we’ve received a lot of comments since then they might not show up in the “Newest comments” bar—I’ve asked about it but there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about that.)

If you post a message and it seems to disappear, please don’t try to post it again—if the first posting of it vanished, odds are the second one will as well, and we’ll just end up with multiple copies of that post in the spamtrap. If you’re really concerned, contact us by e-mail or twitter and we’ll look as soon as we can (though it may not be much sooner than we would have been able to otherwise—I work 8 hours a day, for instance).

Thanks for your patience.

By Chris Meadows

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!