morning lineup firegeezer on 02 Jul 2008 07:32 am
Morning Lineup - July 2
Allow me to take a couple of minutes to explain something about internet “spam” and website Comments boards. By now, everybody is familiar with those billions of unwanted messages and ads that are spewed out constantly by the cretins known as spammers. Some of it is really vile stuff, too. Most of these spam generators are located in places like China, Russia and Thailand because they are out of the reach of the law enforcement agencies of the free world.
While you have probably seen some of this stuff that sneaks through into your emails, a large segment of it is targeted for website Comments pages. And I mean a lot of it. I have two spam filters set up in front of my Comments board and they grab and discard more than 10 thousand spams per month. Naturally, the dirty-word filter catches the bulk of them, but sometimes one will sneak through. The people who send these things out are always trying to construct the message in a way that escapes the filter so that they can plant their ad in the website.
When one of those is-it-or-isn’t-it ads comes along, the filter will sometimes move it into a moderation queue instead of just tossing it. When they end up there, I have to go in and visually check them out and either toss them or allow them on through. I do that about four times a day. And that’s where you come into this scenario.
Normally when you leave a Comment it will just zip right on up there and be posted immediately. But once in a while there will be something in there that triggers the filter and your comment will be held until I release it. The most common content that catches these is when you add in several links to other web pages. Many of the hard-core ads will have a half dozen links to porn sites on them, so the filter is constructed to be triggered if there are two or more page links in the message. And that’s what happens to some of your comments when you are only trying to be informative about something that we posted. But I just about always catch those within a few hours and your comment will eventually be posted. Sometimes the filter will grab one for no apparent reason. At least I can’t spot why. But when I see it in the moderation stack I release it. I’m sorry when that happens, but it’s the price we have to pay in this ugly world we’re in.
On very rare occasions I have to edit out a particularly uncouth wording, but I think I’ve only done that once (or maybe twice). We’ve got a good group of readers here and I don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff coming from you. One thing that I never do is delete any of your comments. That section is there to provide a platform for your opinions or ideas. I’ve already given mine. I don’t care if you disagree with me, we both have a right to be wrong about something, eh?
What all this boils down to is this: If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, it’s because the filter was triggered by something (or in some cases, nothing) and there will be a delay before it shows up. But it will get there. And thanks for joining in and taking the time to Comment.
Now let’s get the equipment checked out. I need to get some coffee.
