Comments, Spam, Loyal Readers, and False Positives

The many interesting comments left by our informed readership help make Credit Slips one of the best places on the Internet for informed discussion about debt and bankruptcy issues. The many spam comments make Credit Slips a less useful resource.

Our hosting service, Typepad, has tools to help us deal with the spam and recently rolled out a new service that has significantly reduced the amount of comment spam that I have been seeing on my blog admnistrator's dashboard. At the same time, this new service seems to be creating false positives, at least judging by a few comments I have seen from long-time readers and regular commenters asking what happened to their comment. If the spam filter screens out a comment, it never shows up in my dashboard to allow me to "un-spam" it.

If your legitimate comment disappears, I apologize for that. You might try authenticating with a Typepad account or rewording the comment slightly. The anti-spam service is supposed to be a learning algorithm and should get better over time. We do not screen out comments because they express a different opinion or criticize a blog post. I do screen out comments that make it through the spam filter but are still spam (e.g., "Very informative post. Click here for scammy debt relief services you don't need.") I also will screen out comments that are vulgar, profane, or are just personal attacks, but I can count on one hand the number of times we have received those sorts of comments since we started the blog in 2006.