I was not online from last Thursday lunchtime until Monday morning. When I went to check on the Spam and Trash folders on Monday, there was 0 Spam and 2 Trash. Both comments in the Trash folder were genuine comments, so I restored them.
Now it is Wednesday, and the figures are 0 Spam, 0 Trash.
After over 11 years of blogging, this is a first.
Where has it all gone?
Over the past couple of days, I have received quite a lot of comments from people who are being shown as ‘Anonymous’, or ‘Someone’. Dozens of those were put into the Spam Folder by WordPress, but others with relevant remarks about the post were left as ‘Awaiting Moderation’.
Due to the sheer volume of Spam comments and Internet scams, I decided to mark the supposedly genuine comments as Spam. Each one came from a different IP address, which is in itself suspicious.
If this is you, and your genuine comment confused by WordPress (or me) as Spam, then please let me know.
This is one of those comments. If you recognise it as yours, please contact me at my email address which is on my About page.
“Tea, cake and didn’t rain. Almost perfect”.
While I am discussing glitches, has anyone else lost all of their Stats information when using a Tablet or Phone to access their blog admin? Since yesterday, if I look at my blog using a tablet, there are no stats for views and comments, just a row of zeros.
When I logged on this morning, I checked the Admin page as usual, and found that the potential Spammers had exceeded themselves overnight.
1,500 new Spam comments!
Fortunately, all had been identified by WordPress and placed in the Spam Folder, so I was able to delete them all with one click.
This is most definitely a new one-day record for me.
Just to let you know that if you comment on a post and it doesn’t appear, it is probably in one or other of those folders. If you inform me by email, I will try to search for your comment and restore it, but otherwise I don’t have the time (or the patience) to search through the ever-growing Spam and Trash folders every day.
As as example, today alone I have had 525 Spam comments and 105 Trash comments. It seems that the WP filters are doing their job well, but of course a genuine comment may get included in error.
You can use either email address to inform me.
petejohnson50@yahoo.com
peteypops44@gmail.com
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been receiving 7-9 pages of Spam comments daily, and at least 5 pages of Trash, or more. I have done my best to sift through all the nonsense in the hope of finding genuine comments, and managed to retrieve at least 10 this week.
But I no longer have the time or the inclination to do this, so I am apologising in advance for any of your comments that do not appear.
From today, I will be applying ‘Bulk Delete’ on all of it.
Reading through the Spam and Trash folders today to check for genuine comments, something occurred to me.
Spam links could actually be very useful, but only…
*If I lived in America and needed to get my Sprinter repaired.
*If I lived in Orange County (which is in California, apparently) and needed spares for my RV.
*If I owned an RV and needed it to be serviced.
*If I had a forklift truck in need of repair.
*If I wanted to learn how to operate a forklift truck.
*If I wanted to contact willing girls in the Far East.
*If I wanted to stream live pornography for a bargain price.
*If I wanted someone to completely upgrade my website and attract more site traffic.
*If I needed some form of tablet that would act as a sexual stimulant.
*If I wanted to get my website onto the top three of every Google Search.
*If I needed a replacement windscreen for my delivery truck.
*If I lived in Auckland (New Zealand) and wanted to buy a bargain price SUV.
*If I wanted to invest in a new ‘Condo’ in Florida.
Unfortunately, none of those apply to me.
WordPress continues to sneak genuine comments into both of these folders, for no apparent reason.
After searching through ten pages of comments this evening, I found three genuine comments from trusted followers.
So my tip for today is that it might be worth you taking time to check yours.
It is only Thursday, and so far this week I have had to recover 17 genuine comments from either the Spam or Trash folders.
None of these comments contained any ‘banned words’, and none had any links, suspicious or otherwise. It appears that WP is dumping some comments randomly again, so you may all want to check these folders before deleting them in bulk.
Following my recent ‘Spamalanche’, (Spam+Avalanche) I went back into my settings and reviewed my ‘Disallowed Comment Keys’, as recommended by some blogging friends.
This is a fancy name for words you don’t allow in comments, email addresses and urls associated with spammers, or just anything you recognise as being consistent with hundreds of Spam comments every day.
For example, this is my current list of disallowed words, numbers, and terms.
(You can find yours by looking at your most frequent Spam comments, without clicking on them.)
91.211.98.0
91.211.96.0
91.211.88.127
hydroxychloroquine
chloroquine
Muchas gracias
Porn
CBD
Escortcl.com
Hairstyles
Morovicracks.com
slkjdf.net
Vapor
Hairdressing
Vape
Праздники
bitcoin
casino
slkjfdf.net
slkfdf.net
cialis
escort
escortzen
As you can see, it is a mixed bag, and all of this was generating something like 2,000 Spam comments every week. This meant I missed genuine comments, as I had no time to find them in all that junk
Almost overnight, I went from 300 Spam comments a day, down to 5-10 a day.
My Trash folder went from next to nothing in it, to a current total of 1,963 ‘disallowed’ comments.
I no longer have to worry about missing good comments, at least as long as someone doesn’t use any of those words or terms.
If you want to try this, it’s easy.
Settings > Discussion Settings > Disallowed Comment Keys
Type in anything you want to be disallowed, then remember to scroll down and SAVE CHANGES.
You can edit the list anytime you like, saving changes every time you do.
Apologies for missing off the episode of ‘Outside’ yesterday. It will be posted later today.
Sorry to say I am getting between 70-100 Spam comments arriving in my Spam Folder every day at the moment, something of a ‘Spam Avalanche’.
I just don’t have the time to check them individually, so if anyone’s comments are being put in Spam by mistake, I apologise in advance for missing them.
I am just using the ‘Empty Spam’ option, to delete them in bulk.
beetleypete 