J.D. Hodges

What to do if your comments are being flagged as spam?!

Try revising your comment: If it is a particular comment/blog that is causing you problems, then you may want to revise your comment (remove URLs and any keywords that may be getting flagged as spam). Sometimes a surprisingly simple revision can help a legit comment get approved when it was previously getting flagged as spam.

Nicely contact the blog admin: If your comments are only blocked for a particular blog or two, you may want to try kindly contacting the blog owner/admin to see if they can manually review/approve your comment and rescue it from the spam filter. Please be aware that, just like you, most bloggers are busy people. So please be patient and don’t be rude to them :-).

If necessary, contact Akismet: Finally, if your comments are ALL getting automatically flagged as a spam regardless of content… and this occurs on ALL WordPress based blogs that you visit, then it sounds like you may need to contact Akismet. Again, please be polite and patient if you do contact them.

I hope this tips help you!  You can read more details below about what prompted this entry…

MORE DETAILS:

For a couple years I’ve known that my comments were being flagged as spam. Specifically, when I would try to comment on some WordPress blogs using my personal contact info my comments would invariably (regardless of content) be flagged as spam.

This spam-flagging was being done by Akismet, a generally good spam-fighting plugin. The first blog I ever noticed this happening on was kohlercreated. I’m not sure what prompted me to get flagged as a spammer in the first place, but some flag was definitely being thrown that “hey, this email address & URL should be marked as spam”. This reoccurred on a number of sites where I personally knew the bloggers.

Normally if you post a bunch of hyperlinks in your comments, or do other semi-suspect things, it may reach a threshold where your comment is deemed as likely spammy. However,  in this case it was simply my contact info, and not the content, that was causing the spam flag to be thrown: I could post the EXACT same comment but use my work contact info and everything would be A-Okay, revert to personal info and auto-flagged as spam. So, that’s the way things went for quite some time. It wasn’t a big deal because: #1 I don’t normally post that many comments around the web and #2 I could always just use my work contact info.

Recently, however, it was becoming a bit more annoying. Specifically I’m doing more posts on jdhodges.com and I’m also reading more blogs. I’d like to do more commenting and it’d be nice if people I comment on could visit my homepage instead of my workpage. 🙂 It was beginning to stink when I’d try to comment on one of my fav sites, like 43rumors.com or Chad’s blog and my comments would never make it through.

So, how to remedy the situation? Contact Akismet. That’s the general consensus, and I’m fine with that, but I’d read some horror stories out there about how long it takes to get OFF their spam list:

So,with some trepidation I finally contacted Akismet to try to get my info taken of the spam list:

> Hello,
> When commenting using my personal contact info, my comments seem to be flagged
> as spam by Akisment. This happens even on blogs that my friends’ have or blogs that I
> help setup (via Weblogs.us) 🙁 If I use my work contact email and URL to post the exact
> same comment then it will go through just fine. The moment I use my
> personal email/URL they get flagged as spam.
>
> Any help in resolving this would be greatly appreciated.  If there’s any
> additional info that you need me to provide, please let me know.
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> Best regards,

> -JD
> jd.hodges@gmail.com

And that was that. I expected in a couple weeks or a few months the issue would be resolved and I might be notified…

Instead, literally minutes later, I recieved the following concise but courteous response:

Hi,

Sorry for the problem.  I believe it is fixed now.

-- Mark

So, I was extremely pleased. The next step, to try posting a comment and  see if I was truly de-spam-flagged… The result: SUCCESS!

(full thread over here, discussing Olympus targeting moms in their advertising)

Woot! Thanks to Akismet for being so responsive. 🙂 And silly me for waiting so long to contact them…