Hey, I noticed I’ve made more than 2 or 3 comments on your blog but my ID wasn’t showing in Top Commentators section. Am I caught in comment spam too?

There’s something going on with the top commentators list…you’re there, at the bottom, but there’s no link. I’ll have to look into it and see what might be happening.

Sorry to hear you’ve had some nasty comments lately! Some people have nothing better to do, I guess.

Blogger does not have comment spam filter like Askimet and I don’t moderate comment. Luckily I haven’t been hit with comment spam until now.

However, some of my posts had received anonymous comments that was sarcastic at best and hateful at its worst. I generally ignore these cowardly acts, but due to comment not moderated, they were still published and became an eye sore.

Hey, I noticed I’ve made more than 2 or 3 comments on your blog but my ID wasn’t showing in Top Commentators section. Am I caught in comment spam too?

I did make a comment on your blog on a Saturday, and saw the post you mentioned. It didn’t make me feel unwelcome, in fact I appreciated the fact that you gave me a heads up. I didn’t wonder then when it took time for the comment to be moderated.

Jay wrote:

TYPO: “prophalactically” was misspelled. Sorry!

Yet more search engine bait.

My sister set up her blog a few months ago. (Alas, she has moved on to other things. It hasn’t been updated in over a month.) Within days, there were SPAM comments masquerading as legitimate, with affiliate links to Amazon products posted as comments with helpful on-topic suggestions.

I started my blog as a lark, in order to be able to comment on my sister’s blog. When I saw how quickly her quiet little corner of the Internet became cluttered with comment SPAM, I chose to moderate every comment propholactically instead of having to dig out links later.

Some of those comment SPAMs look very real, and they are being made by real people, not programs. If they get deleted, a real reader might become offended…

Waiting for comments to be approved gets in the way of lively conversation amongst the readers. Have I mentioned that it’s annoying?
I don’t want to be in the middle of every conversation, and I don’t want the conversation to wait for my errands to complete before continuing.

Meanwhile, I’m a Sabbath observer. This means that I can’t moderate comments on Friday nights or Saturdays. Preparing for the Sabbath makes Fridays very busy in real life for me. Thus there is a minimum of 25 hours where I can’t moderate comments - more like 40 hours straight, from Friday afternoons until late Saturday nights.

Had I let the blog live without moderation, a raging fire could be burning by the time I returned to view the blog on Saturday night. EIther a flame war, or a SPAM attack, or…???

Many of my readers are not Jewish (or not Sabbath-observing Jews), and not aware the Sabbath. When someone makes a comment on a Friday afternoon, and gets no result for 40 hours, it can make them nervous. They might think that I deleted the comment, or that I had a negative reaction to it, or that the blog is broken….

Thus, I started the practice of making a quick post every Friday afternoon, announcing the situation. I try to make the post positive, with pictures of the freshly baked breads and desserts, with my scrubbed-clean-for-Shabbat kids smiling, a quick recipe, etc.

Yet, still, it seems to me like an “UNWELCOME” mat. The Friday afternoon post stays at the top of the blog, until at least Saturday night, often until Monday morning, if we’re busy on Sundays.

(I haven’t worked out that delayed posting scheme we discussed earlier.)

So, while moderating every comment has made my blog a ZERO SPAM blog, it has many disadvantages. It encumbers conversation, it takes my time, it annoys me and my readers, and it has made for a 25-40 hour block every week where new readers to my blog are faced with a “GO AWAY” message.