I was recently contacted by someone who’d tried and failed to post a comment on one of my blog articles. It turned out that his comment had, for no very obvious reason, been classified as spam. As I haven’t had any previous false positives for spam here before, I was no longer bothering to check the spam queue for them. To my knowledge no other messages have failed to get through, but I had noticed that I’d received few comments recently.
When you post a comment you should see the article you’re replying to, existing comments, and your comment, with a note that your comment will appear after moderation.* If you don’t get that (and, of course, you’re not a spammer) then it’s worth emailing me saying which article you were replying to and I’ll investigate.
I use the Akismet plugin to catch spam and, as I say, until now it’s been very good at doing so. I will look at the spam queue from time to time though, just in case. Unfortunately, I can’t tell on what grounds a particular message is designated as spam, or adjust the software myself in any way, except for removing the plugin which would flood me with spam. The software lives on WordPress’s server; this blog used to be kept on a server local to me but the volume of spam directed at it put a strain on it as it was not intended for high traffic.
* I admit most non-spam comments exactly as submitted. There have been a few genuine comments which I have not let through, or which I have withdrawn, if they have seemed to cross the line from fair comment into unsupported and unverifiable attacks on particular people or organisations. Merely disagreeing with me is a different matter. I once edited an otherwise unobjectionable comment to remove a personal telephone number.