It has taken Anthony a lot of hard work to make WUWT the success it is, and success comes at a price, which in blogging terms means even more hard work. The recent changes at WUWT are intended to lessen the workload associated with managing comments, and more changes are promised, but so far so good.
A high proportion of comments are now posted immediately, but, as many of you have experienced, certain key words, names, and phrases will trigger a comment to require moderation.
Anyone unsure about what is acceptable, check About/Policy.
Trolls beware – life on the edge is risky, and the delete button is an easy option.
Some people are flagging up comments as ‘going missing’. This means they’ve disappeared into the SPAM bin. As before, banned commenters and blacklisted subjects (by key word) still go straight to SPAM, along with true SPAM as flagged by the WordPress system. Those who’ve been banned, know who they are. For everyone else, all of this is automatic, don’t take it personally, and please don’t ask:
Moderators – my comment seems to have gone into the spam bin, please can you retrieve it?
That rankles. We waste a lot of time searching through the SPAM folder to retrieve valid comments and approving each one once retrieved. Sometimes there is simply insufficient time for fishing out comments. It would be preferable to move to a policy of a blanket delete of all SPAM, and that is likely to happen increasingly, especially at busy times.
WordPress explains why SPAM has become such a problem. Why do spammers do it?
Apart from because they can, the need to raise page ranking in search engines gives rise to the need to create a lot of links to a web page so the search engine thinks that page is important.
Just so you can see the size of the issue at WUWT, here is a peek inside the SPAM bin from earlier today. All of these are selling something or aim to entice traffic to one or more sites.
Note the submission times. Often SPAM comes in FASTER than genuine comments. It is not unusual to log in to the blog and find 50-100 items – several pages worth – in the SPAM bin, however there’s a lovely button labelled “Empty SPAM” that does just what it says.
Poof! Gone in an instant! Deleted!
It can be frustrating to lose a comment, but please try to see it from the other side. If you do lose a long comment to SPAM that never appears, yes, that’s tough, but so is keeping on top of SPAM. Due to the risk of such losses, we suggest preparing long (if you must) technical comments in an external system and pasting them into the comment box.
We hope readers continue to help make the site what it is, and can bear the odd wrinkle as we cope with the blog’s ongoing success.
===============================================================
Note: In trying to solve one problem I inadvertently created another. In response to this, and from other notes from readers, I have made a change to the SPAM filter that should help with this problem, let’s see how it goes.
Hopefully one this new comment system is well tuned I can implement other changes that are planned to improve tips and notes/story submissions, making WUWT more community oriented. In the meantime, I thank you for your patience, and I thank Verity for this essay. – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It’s the Heineken.
Well that is the problem right there. It seems that it should be possible to keep 3 separate buckets using the 3 separate items you just outlined …
(1) banned commenters
(2) blacklisted subjects (by key word)
(3) true SPAM as flagged by the WordPress system
At least that’s how I would do it. Naturally if this is impossible (3 separate buckets) I’m spinning my wheels.
I suppose it might “rankle” moderators but you are forgetting something here. On our end we do NOT get any message that says: “comment sent to moderation due to keyword trigger, please be patient!”. What we get is, wait for it, NOTHING. That rankles. People that are new to this will then actually waste time retyping and/or resubmitting and then finally get the “duplicate comment detected” feedback. Lots of wasted time all around.
For several years now I would immediately send a 2nd message (with a ‘please do not post this’) asking a moderator to find the post. This made sense on our end where we got no feedback in the first place. Now it sounds like you’re telling us that one thing HAS changed (“don’t rankle us with a request”) and one thing HAS NOT changed (posts still get sucked into the black hole from a keyword without feedback).
One of the moderators has in fact gotten snarky with me over this exact scenario implying I was impatient (what?) when on our end we are dealing with no feedback whatsoever to know what happened to a post. All I was doing was pointing out that a non-SPAM post was now mixed in with the SPAM. Wasting time arguing with a snarky moderator also rankles. 😉
Is it possible to allow regular commenters’ multiple linked comment automatically added. Like an auto screen based on a ‘trusted’ user? For example I don’t recall ever posting any spam, so can me email and screen name not be automatically allowed. Do you see where I’m coming from?
I’ll drink to that! Thanks, Anthony and Mods!
I had no gripes before (even though I was sniped sometimes), and I have no gripes now.
Keep up the great work.
Unfortunately, the WordPress system has its limits. I have to say, having moved my own blog from Blogger, WordPress gives much more flexibility with comments, but don’t forget that high volume blogs like WUWT push the system. The guys at WordPress are adding greater flexibility and more options with great frequency.
@Allen63, Thanks for the Lazarus tip. I’m sure that will be useful to many.
@Jimbo, sadly for the multiple links thing it is not possible to discriminate for regular commenters.
@Blade, there is a single SPAM bucket – WordPress system, not changeable. I take your point of frustration about comments just disappearing into the SPAM bin. It happens to me too and you do think “Huh, what happened?”.
The point is that, when moderation needed more than a light touch, both comments and spam built up and the comments got priority. Moderators look in the SPAM bin when they have time. All the pages of spam have to be checked (method as described by West Coast Moderator) and it doesn’t really help to see a comment that tells you there is a legitimate comment in the SPAM bin as it is a case of “I’ll get to it as soon as I have time”. The new system should free everyone up to check more readily.
First, sincere thanks to all moderators and helpers who contribute their time and skills to making WUWT so informative and enjoyable for readers.
Thanks also for clarifying some of the challenges you face in managing the workload, and while nobody likes losing a post or not being sure what happened to it, I think it is reasonable for us to do our part by keeping copies of our deathless prose if it so important to us. Posters above have suggested ways of doing this.
And I am grateful to find out why an innocuous post of mine went straight into moderation yesterday – it was because it had the “A” word in it, although it was used in the nicest possible way! To avoid this happening to this post, special thanks to “A” – he knows who I mean …
Spoke too soon – my post of a few minutes ago has also gone into moderation. What am I doing this time?
West Coast Moderator>
“When I moderate I personally review every spam post, and save the few legitimate comments. Then I hit the “delete all spam” button, and approve the saved comments”
I hope you’ve spotted the race-condition there.
On another note, what spam filter does WUWT use? Akismet, I take it? Some people claim much better results with other WP plug-ins, but then I assume that’s been investigated, right?
[“Race condition” ??? Not-the-East-Coast-Mod Mod]
Dave is likely a programmer (or an electrician), it has nothing to do with other things 🙂 I suspect he sees a possible failure vector in that procedure where one moderator “review[s] every spam post” but by the time that is complete new entries may have arrived and deleting all spam may result in non-reviewed comments vanishing into the ether. But I’ll let him explain what he meant.
I’ve been commenting here for 4 or 5 years now. WUWT opened my eyes to the AGW scam even though I was beginning to smell a rat with the exponential growth of improbable scientific claims and hysterical headlines in the printed and transmitted media.
It is good to see my comments appear immediately and it enables me to respond to other posters quickly if I feel the need.
Thank you for the trust you’ve put in our behaviour. I hope I live up to expectations. Finally thank you for this excellent blog. You fight for sanity in a world gone mad with AGW alarmism. Viva common sense!
Whoa, where did those thumbs-up/down rating buttons come from?