Ah yes I love it when I have time to write on my bad old blog cleverly disguised as a hot dog stand.
If you have not been seeing my comments on your blog it is becasue you have a WordPress blog and have installed "akismet" to block the large volume of spam that goes to WordPress bloggers. Akismet is smarter than most and has decided that I am bad and I am banned from commenting on all WordPress blogs.
I have been commenting in recent days, I just leave my domain name off and sometimes just use one of the 10 or 12 other domain names that go to my blog. On the one hand there is such an easy work around that I think akismet is not so smart. On the other hand I have freinds out there who like to see my comments on their blogs, but they never will. They can’t control akismet.
Typepad works differently. I get little spam and I have a lot more control. People have gotten banned by the software, but I can fix it or have it fixed so they can comment again. So I say to akismet users, do you have that kind of control? If so I would like to leave comments on your blogs using my regular domain name.
If you don’t have that kind of control, which other domain names are being blocked? Are you ticking someone off without knowing it? Isn’t web 2.0 about having a two way conversation? When software makes decisions about who to include and who to exclude does it always make the same decision a human would?
It would be easy for me to ban all wordpress bloggers from commenting on my blogs, but I would never do that. I leave comments on blogs becasue I have something to say, not for a link back to my own blog, so I will keep commenting. It will affect my ratings to have fewer links to my blog but it will be gradual and I won’t feel the impact for many months, and who knows by then maybe I won’t be banned any more. . . but maybe I will be. Who knows, it is in the hands of a machine somewhere and I am just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.
Teresa- I got so freaked I went to akismet and hit their FAQS – It said that Teresa Boardman is a dangerous and subversive REALTOR with astonishing graphic skilz – BEWARE 🙂
Actually it said what follows:
Help! Akismet is catching a regular comment as spam!
Don’t worry, if you see a regular comment on your Akismet page, just click the “Not Spam” checkbox and submit and the comment will be sent back to Akismet as a mistake. The system will learn from your submission, though it may take a day or so in some cases. False positives, as they’re called, are extremely rare and we watch them closely.
Hope this helps – LaniAR Made me a WordPress person – it wasn’t my fault – Honest!
I hate how Akismet does that from time-to-time.
The most common time this happens with real estate professionals is when they leave comments on blogs where the host doesn’t like them… If the host decides to mark their comment as “spam” instead of simply “deleting” them.. and the person keeps leaving comments… then they will quickly end up in the spam for everyone using Akismet.
Anyway, unless you are particularly persistent in leaving comments on sites that mark you as spam (Joseph of Sellsius comes to mind), then it won’t be long before you get out of the spam bin.
But here’s a tip. If you leave a comment and notice that you are in the spam bin, then email the author to have them take you out… Otherwise, if the blog host doesn’t take you out, then it just reinforces that you’re spam to the algorithms.
thanks but I have been on the bad list for more than a month. I don’t always have time to comment let alone time to contact people. I will try but I need help. Maybe people need to check the spam. I know I do on my wordpress blog so I can take action if it blocks someone that it should not.
A friend told me that no one could ban me or make it hard but I suspect that is not entirly true. There is a group of us who are suddenly having these problems and we all have one thing in common.
Askimet is overrated. I moved on a long time ago.
Todd – you are such a trouble maker. Now I must comment on your most excellent blogs more often. 🙂
Yeah it means someone likely spamboxed you and then Askimet just labels you spam everywhere until you get other Askimet defended blogs pulling you out of the spam pile.
Come post on my blog and I’ll try rescue you 🙂
Athol – I kind of thought that is how it works. I did leave a comment on your blog. Thanks. I am told it will take awhile but until I wrote this post I didn’t know it could be done.
Hi – your comments should be okay now. But any other problems do get in touch with Akismet support.
Sorry for the trouble caused.
Mark – thanks.
Teresa, I few weeks ago, I asked a mutual friend to let you know what they went through that was similar. A competing blogger in their market decided to comment on hundreds of porn, pharmaceutical and other blogs in their name and by association their name became spam. What you have in common with others in this trap is that you are a big name and thus a target for others to screw with.
Gee thanks, interwebs- you’re awesome. 🙁
Wow, this was quite an eye opener. Thanks for the heads up on this.