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Who, Me? I Don't Spam

In mid 20th century USA culture, one popular magazine had a mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, who was best known for the intellectually incurious
What, me worry?

As the comment spam filters are being trained, by blog owners such as you or me "voting" each individual comment as spam or not spam, we are starting to see modern day Alfreds asking in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken
What, me spam?
or given slightly longer and more descriptive quotes
Why are my comments treated as spam by Blogger?

Harsh though this may be, your comments are treated as spam, by Blogger, because either
  • Many blog owners have "voted" your comments, posted to their blogs, to be spam.
  • Many blog owners have "voted" similar comments, posted by spammers, to their blogs, to be spam.
The bottom line here is that your style of comments just are not welcome, on these blogs.

You have 3 possible courses of action.
  1. Continue to post these comments to these blogs.
  2. Post these comments to other blogs.
  3. Post other comments to these blogs.
I'll leave to you the decision of which choice to make - door number one, door number two, or door number three.

The individual blog owners have the right to "vote" your comments, as they see fit. The blog owners make the final decision.

Looking at an alternate (and more annoying) scenario, it's possible that a few blog owners started out from the beginning with
What, me moderate?
These owners refused to moderate comments, months ago. Instead of moderating, they have been trusting on blog obscurity, CAPTCHA verification, and / or Google authentication to restrict their commenters - and they let other blog owners, who actively moderated every comment, to set the standards.

Now that the filters are trained, these blog owners are looking in their Spam queues, and asking
Why are these comments from my faithful readers being marked as spam? I didn't do that!
The answer here is
You didn't do that, intentionally. You did it by not moderating.
These blog owners are learning that they have to get to work, and train the filters. And since the filters have already been trained, they probably have 2 or 3 times as much work to do, now, to correct the mistraining done to date.

Their mistake (then) is your problem (now).

If you wish to publish comments to these blogs, you will post comments that must be moderated, and explicitly designated as "Not Spam" by the owners - or you face having your blog classified as a spam host, because you are advertising your blog by posting spam comments.

In extreme cases, this may leave you learning the Blogger Four Step Spam Review procedure. Alternately, you may, with our blessings, move your spammy operations to other blog hosts.

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Comments

Lorelei said…
I'm sorry, I've read this twice and still do no understand what about my followers comments would be deemed spam. If they say the same kind of comment or something? Like "awesome update" or is that okay if they add a happy face?

I don't understand what you are saying we should do as in "only three things you can do". I haven't been doing this long so that may be it, or I may just be obtuse, or possibly both, but most of this is Greek to me.

Nevertheless I live in terror that my little blog will be obliterated due to charges of spam.
1CardCreator said…
I just want to say thanks, good job, and yes I have been moderating and you do a good job flushing them all into spam for me. ~Diane
Nitecruzr said…
Lorelei,

I can't say, for sure, what your problem is. What I know is that comment filtering is not optional - and if you're not actually moderating, somebody else may be training the filters that affect your blog.
Lorelei said…
Well, I thought I was--my comments have to be reviewed by me and then made public if I think they're okay, but it seemed you were saying that is not enough.. It separates Spam from my other comments; I also have to look occasionally to see if there is spam in the folder, but so far, there never is.
Nitecruzr said…
Lorelei,

Maybe we should explore this problem in some detail. If you have not started a discussion in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, why not do that. Let's see if there is a real problem, somewhere.
zoomom said…
I've read quite a bit now and I still think there is a problem with the filtering. I comment on two blogs regularly, both by the same author; they just notified me that although they always like my comments, they have to get them out of the spam folder every time. They haven't neglected to moderate, I haven't spammed anyone, yet this is still happening.

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