Housekeeping: Want To Avoid Commenting Problems? Register and Be Logged In

I keep hearing about readers having issues with comments. It seems to be one of two main issues: 1.) they get a notice that says “You’re commenting too quickly” (or something like that) and their comment disappears. or 2.), it just disappears.

I just did a test, and I am now quite certain these issues only arise if you’re not logged in. And of course you have to be registered at CC before you can log in.

I just copied and pasted some absurdly long comments with lots of links from our Trashed/Spam comments file, and I could leave them as comments repeatedly, without any hesitation or issue. I was logged, as I always am, and undoubtedly, the Akismet Spam Filter thinks I must be ok as long as I’m registered and signed in.

Then I logged out and tried the same thing again, leaving several of these comments from the Trash and Spam files, and it was impossible. I got the “You’re commenting too quickly” message once, and the the other two times it just went blank.

So instead of writing me emails or leaving comments about the commenting problems, please make sure you’re registered and logged in. And if you’re registering for the first time ans having a problem with your initial Log In, here’s the remedy:

Trouble getting an initial Log In after registering for the first time at CC? Unfortunately, it’s a common problem, and here’s the fix;  Try to Log In, but pretend you forgot your password, and ask for a new password to be sent to you via email. Use that to Log In, and if that works fine (it always does) you can always change your password to your preferred one.

In other words, pretend you forgot your password.

Please not that we get bordered by hundreds of spam comments every day. These are left by bots, and their purpose is to improve their own site’s Google Search Rankings by having a link at our site, since we have a relatively high Google Search Ranking. Or for other reasons. But these bots don’t register, and therefore their comments are subject to the very stringent filters of the Akismet software. But if you’re registered and signed in, your can leave crazy comments like some of the ones like these below, just so you have a taste of what we’re bombarded with.

 

From Akismet’s website:

Akismet is the most powerful anti-spam service for the web. Akismet works by checking all your comments against our constantly-growing global spam database to remove irrelevant, malicious content before it gets published and damages your site’s credibility.

Akismet gets increasingly effective over time: the more it learns, the more it protects. Its algorithms are continuously learning from content marked as spam across websites, so it more accurately detects and removes spam from sites in the future.

When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet’s core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. We do not sell the data you send to the Akismet service, and we do not keep it for long. We have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases. Anyone can opt-out of all long-term tracking for the very small subset of data we do keep longer by using our contact form. For more information, please visit our Privacy Notice.

Who we are and what we stand for

Akismet is brought to you by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. We’re a distributed company with over 800 employees across over 65 countries speaking over 80 different languages. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. You can read more about Automattic on our About Us page.

Akismet was created in 2005 by Automattic’s CEO, Matt Mullenweg (also the co-founder of WordPress, the open-source CMS software) in order to help protect his mother’s personal blog from spam. Since then, it has grown exponentially to detect and protect over 6 million websites (as of January 2019).