The Real Blogger Status

The new Blogger commenting system has been in place in many of our blogs for just over two weeks . Some blog owners, who moderate using the new system, have started to notice a marked decrease in spam, hitting our Published, and Awaiting Moderation, queues, as the filters are trained. Other bloggers, who do not moderate, are observing the opposite. Since the new commenting system was started, my blog is getting twice as much spam as before. Oddly enough, both results were predictable.

Now that the new commenting system is a reality, many blogger are learning that the filters provided in the new system need training . Until the filters are trained, we will continue to see unwanted comments in our "Awaiting Moderation" folder. Before the new system was provided, many of us who moderated comments may have gotten used to simply moderating when we had nothing else to do. We would let comments "awaiting moderation" pile up for days, before selecting and "Publishing" or "Rejecting" each one, in turn.

Occasionally, content that we don't recognise may show up in our blogs. There are several different ways that the bad guys may have, in getting their unwanted contributions into our blogs. If you read the latter article, don't find an explanation to your immediate problem there, and conclude that your blog has been hijacked, try not to panic. First, verify who has control of the blog in question. Go to Settings - Permissions, and examine the list of blog members. Do you recognise every administrator and author on the list? If you have access to the Permissions list, and have the "Add Authors" button, you still have control of the blog. If so, the blog has not been hijacked. Now, you have to find out what has actually happened, and ensure that you retain control. If you see an unknown administrator listed there, did you install an accessory improperly ? If you see an unknown author, did an invited author maybe create a second account or invite a friend , ...

A few bloggers in Jordan - apparently customers of the Orange ISP - are reporting inability to access Blog*Spot URLs, with no apparent problem with non Blog*Spot, Blogger, or Google. We have a problem rollup in Blogger Help Forum , where the problem is being explored. If you are affected by this outage, please confirm your location, the name of your ISP, and the scope of the outage . Explicit confirmation of each individual detail, by each blogger with a problem, helps Blogger Engineers to focus on the problem - and not on speculations. >> Top

As the new comment moderation system gets deployed on more blogs , we are seeing a few reports of problems moderating using email. Some bloggers report inability to moderate, without having to sign in again, repeatedly, to their Blogger accounts. Other blogger have observed that some comments, selected as "Publish" or "Mark as spam", seem to remain in the current queue also. In some cases, bloggers have selected "Publish" repeatedly, with no error provided.

Now that we are seeing the new Blogger commenting system rolled out through the majority of our blogs , some bloggers are seeing problems with the "spam" / "not spam" classification of some comments. While the training process is in progress, and the system is still "learning" which comments are spam - and which are not spam, we are going to see some legitimate comments dropped into the "Spam" folder. We will similarly continue to see some spam comments published (with moderation not enabled), or dropped into the "Awaiting Moderation" folder (with moderation enabled).

Many bloggers are enjoying the new ability to "Mark as spam" any offending comments, with the anticipation that shortly similar comments will be routed directly to the "Spam" Comment folder. Other bloggers, who do not see "Mark as spam?" are asking How do I report these comments? Blogger has told us that the new comment moderation system is not yet rolled out to all blogs, as this is being done on a blog by blog basis. If you don't yet see a "Mark as spam" link or selection in your comment moderation queue, rest assured that you will, soon. And later, you'll stop seeing the typical "Nice blog" spam - unless you go diving into the Spam Comments folder. Be patient, your blog will have the new system shortly - if it does not, already. And if your blog does offer you this ability, use it. The new system depends upon your input - it will not know what should be put into Spam directly, without votes from you and others like ...