Showing posts with label comments policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comments policy. Show all posts

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Missing comments mystery, solved! Oh, and new comments policy...


by Thaddeus

For about three months now, I've been baffled as to where certain comments have gotten to. Stuff that I and other commentators have written has simply vanished into the ether and I've been accused of censoring it.

Needless to say, this is frustrating to me as I'm not at all in favor of censorship.

Well, Blogspot finally solved my issue. Apparently, the missing posts were going directly into Blogspot's newly created spam filter.

Basically, here are the three things that seems to have turned the spam filter on:

1) Multiple postings in a short period of time. Both Mira and I got caught with this one. If you post TOO much during a given day, Spam Filter thinks that you're a bot.

2) Long blocks of text with no punctuation or capitalization and little if any formatting. Spam Filter thinks this is random spam on the order of dick-enhancement ads. Several of the less-literate Anonymi got caught with this one. You know the type: folks who spew on and one for lines at a time with no regards to capitalization or what not.

3) Large blocks of swearing. Again, certain Anonymi got caught here, particularly the guys who spew "motherfucker" and "shit" in every other sentence.

In order to avoid the Spam Filter in the future, I've now turned on the blog moderating option. This means that your comments will not immediately appear when you send them in, but hopefully if they disappear, you will now know why.

Over the following days, we'll be combing through the spam bin in order to see if anything there deserves to be saved. Please note that not everything appears to be IN the spam bin, so your comment may have been lost for good. Also note that if your comment is basically an illiterate rant, we may choose to not publish it in any case. We'll just have to see.

O Mangue's comment editting policy is as follows:

In general, we support anyone's right to write anything as long as our commentators avoid gratuitous dumb-fuckery. "Gratuitous dumb-fuckery" is a state of affairs that will be determined by Ana and I on a case-by-case basis and we'll let you know why your comments have been classified as such if we choose to use our soverign power as censors. If you think you've been unfairly classified as a gratuitous dumbfuck, please give us a rational reason as to why we should rethink our classification and we'll review your arguments.