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.
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.
After all the problems yesterday with genuine comments going into my Trash folder, when I logged on this morning, I found six more.
So I went straight to the Help option (A big ? in a circle) to chat online with a WP technician on Live Chat.
(This option is available to me as I have a paid plan, Premium.)
After some investigation, WP suggested to me that the comments contained some of my banned words, in particular a combination of the letters RV. This means that words such as ‘Deserved’ and Served’ containing those letters in combination caused the comment to be trashed.
Although this did not seem obvious to me, I have done as they suggested, and removed ‘RV’ from my banned list.
I originally put that on the list as I was being plagued with Spam from an American motorhome company using ‘RV’ (recreational vehicle) in their messages.
If the suggestion from WP does not improve things today, I will be straight back onto them and contacting the Live Chat again.
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.
I have to break my rule of not posting so much to let you know that many comments from regular blogging friends have gone astray.
I was about to empty my Spam and Trash folders earlier, and I was shocked to find 45 genuine comments had been dumped in there by WordPress. I have just had to manually approve and reply to them all. If you left a comment that I did not acknowledge, the chances are it has been trashed and deleted by WordPress, definitely not by me!
Apologies to everyone who kindly left a comment, then must have thought I had completely ignored it. It wasn’t my fault, and seems to be yet another of those random WP glitches that cause me so much annoyance and frustration.
Anyone wondering my my replies have come so late now knows the answer.
My suggestion to you all is to quickly check both Spam and Trash folders.
Comments from your blogging friends may have been dumped there without you knowing.
beetleypete 