Sunday, January 16, 2011

Difficulties Posting

As noted by seydlitz, there have been some of our esteemed crew's posts trapped in the blog's Spam folder. This has caused all kinds of frustration when you don't see a post appear. I'm kinda convinced it has nothing to do with your techniques or browsers.

We barkeeps are going to have to keep an eye on the "Spam Filter" feature that Google provides. My experience with another forum is that due to spammers getting more creative in methods of defeating spam prevention, some major hosts, such as Google, are tending to trigger more "False Positives" while they try to wrestle the problem to ground. I've cleared the Spam Folder by publishing all, to include the many "groans" about failure to publish. I'll try to check there twice a day to catch any unjustly accused material. If a couple of other barkeeps would do the same, that would help. Meanwhile, if a post doesn't, well, post, be patient.

11 comments:

  1. Thanks! It's good to hear we're not crazy....or at least not completely crazy! ;)

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  2. Thanks, Al - I apologize for not getting to this sooner.

    I wonder if we change the settings to provide an authentication? That would seem to elide the need to filter for spam, if the commentor authenticates as a real person...no?

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  3. The problems we had on the other forum were that the authentication routine was actually being subverted by the spammers. Let's just do routine "housekeeping" of the Spam bin for now and see what happens.

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  4. Chief,
    I have made NUMEROUS replies to posts, and my computer shows them as posted, and then they fucking vanish.
    This is frustrating b/c i send long replies, and often my replies are to items that i wrote and others cmtd on, then it looks like i'm a dick wad for not replying. There are so many valid reasons why i'm a DW that i hate to waste a valid criticism.
    I even go in thru Blogger.com.FWIW.
    jim

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  5. yah, I just had one disappear again.

    I don't log in, I just type "name", could that be the issue?

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  6. I didn't even realize there was a spam filter. Now I know, and have even found it, I'll try to help out.

    WRT losing comments, if you've got a computer that'll handle multiple applications, my strong recommendation is to prepare your deathless prose in a WP document, and then cut and paste into comments here or anywhere. Bonus: You can even get a free spell check out of the deal. Bonus#2: You get to keep all of your comments in a single location for the day when you finally get around to writing your best seller about your wonderful blogging experiences on the Internets. Bonus#3: You don't need to worry about looking like a dick wad.

    What is a dick wad, anyway?

    Browser. I like Firefox. IE not. I don't know if blogger cares.

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  7. I am using Safari, but I don't think the browser makes any difference. After I post, you can see it on the website as posted. In fact, the last one I had up, it was up for hours. Then it was just gone, but the number of comments is still the same as if the comment was there.

    Must be some short of a worm or algorithm that periodically sweeps the site, maybe for keywords or some other signatures? Either way, my bet is that it has "blacklisted" some users as "Spammers". I wonder if there is a way to say "I am not spam, leave me alone!"

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  8. Yeah, it's weird. I'm used to having comments with a lot of links in them caught in spam-catchers, but this one is catching just plain old text comments.

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  9. Could be your IP address. No real way to tell. On the other forum, we incorporated an IP address checker to reject registration attempts from known spamming addresses. We run 15 to 30 auto-rejections per day on a forum for a very narrow interest group. Could just be a glitch in Google's attempt to "help" us. We were using a Google service (reCaptcha) to try to ferret out and prevent automated registrations that spammers typically use, and it was being subverted, much to our surprise. (Reposted to correct "our IP Address" to "your IP Address")

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  10. Publius,
    A dick wad is anybody above my paygrade.
    Alternately it's any body that asks what a dw happens to be.
    Either way i think you're covered by fire.
    jim
    PS- just funning.YOU DO NOT FIT MY CLASSIFIED DEFIN OF DW.

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