You don’t see it, but some of my comments are getting deleted by Akismet, the spam blocker that WordPress.com uses. Osman S Borutecene says he’s noticed comments being deleted here seemingly randomly. Truth is commenting in blogging is broken and is getting worse. In just the past 24 hours I’ve manually had to delete about 1,000 spams and in my already blocked page in WordPress.com there are about 10,000 spams. I have absolutely no way to go through and look for false positives, or real comments you’ve left that have been deleted automatically cause they triggered the spam system.
I do notice some trends, though. If you don’t use your full real name (two words like “Robert Scoble”) you’ll get deleted more often. Most spammers use one word names, or three word names. Also, if your post has URLs in it, you’ll be more likely to get deleted.
If you notice your comment gets deleted if you can give me the approximate time you posted it I can usually dig it out of the deleted bucket. Sorry for the troubles, but the comment spam problem is getting dramatically worse. You don’t see it because I also moderate comments from first-time commenters (they wait on a page for my approval, which can take up to a day to get approved, but usually are approved in an hour or two — that’s why spam isn’t getting onto my blog, but I sure see it).
If I ever end up closing my comments this will be why. It’s unbearable at 1,000 spams a day. I can’t imagine how life will be if the spammers start writing more human-like comments and/or if they start moving up to 10,000 or 100,000 per day (Akismet blocks millions of messages across all the blogs every day).
Akismet is both looking at patterns of messages, as well as using the community to block spam. So, if a blogger marks something as spam that really isn’t it’ll get deleted system wide until enough bloggers mark it as not spam. Funny enough my own comments were getting deleted last week too. So it happens to me too!
Scobleizer 