Tag Archives: Comments

SWLing Post comments…some getting lost in our SPAM folder?

Site-SPAM-CommentsThe SWLing Post has been online since 2008–plenty of time for SPAMbots to focus their attention on us! In fact, we receive a SPAM comment, on average, every 3 minutes! Way too many comments to moderate individually.

To fight SPAM, we’ve employed a number of strategies over the years including site plugins, scripts, and external applications.

It seems, though, that our SPAM filters are catching more than SPAM: they’re catching your qualified comments!  Several readers and contributors have contacted me recently and noted that their comments haven’t posted. I’ve had to search through the 4,000+ comments in the SPAM folder using their email address.

If you’re a regular on the SWLing Post and submit a comment, but it doesn’t appear in the post’s comment thread, please notify me!

Keep in mind that there are certain comments that are automatically moderated or sent to the SPAM folder:

  • Those from a new user (who has never had an approved comment)
  • Those with multiple links to external sites (a characteristic of much SPAM)
  • Comments with common profanity

If your comment is sent to moderation, no worries. There are a few volunteer comment moderators that will approve it within minutes or, at most, a few hours.

I’ll attempt to reset/reinstall our SPAM plugins/scripts in the hopes that this will keep our filters from being over-active.  In the meantime, please let me know if your comment doesn’t post, yet meets the criteria above.

Many thanks and apologies for the inconvenience!

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An easier way to comment on the SWLing Post

If you’ve ever commented on the SWLing Post (or almost any other website, for that matter), you’ve no doubt been challenged by a CAPTCHA code before your comment could be published. The CAPTCHA system saves this blog from hundreds of bogus comments each day so it’s a necessary tool.

For those of you not familiar, CAPTCHAs look like this:

CAPTCHA-code

While the CAPTCHA code above is relatively simple, many are not and require several attempts before you can prove to CAPTCHA that you’re a human and not a SPAMbot. In this sense, CAPTCHAs can be rather annoying.

How to get around CAPTCHA on the SWLing Post

If you’re a regular here on the SWLing Post and would like to comment without a CAPTCHA moderation, I can register you for a subscriber account on the SWLing Post. I’ve made it so that CAPTCHA will skip any SWLing Post account holder who is logged in at time of comment.

Because of SPAMbots and Malware, I don’t make registration open to the public; I manually create each account.

If you would like an account, simply email me with the following info:

  • Your preferred username (a one word name, callsign, etc.)
  • Your valid email address
  • The make and model of your favorite radio (just a test to make sure you’re human! SPAMbots rarely listen to the shortwaves.)
  • Optional: your personal website URL (if you have a blog, etc.)
  • Optional: your full name (only if you want your name to show with your comments)

I’ll assign you a password which you can change later.

As soon as I create your account, you’ll receive a short email with your username, password and the URL to log in.

You’ll need to be logged in to the SWLing Post to avoid the CAPTCHA code, but I think it’s a much easier and quicker way to comment.

Again, if you would like to register, simply send the info above via the email address on my Contact page.

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SWLing Post Update: Good news–comments are now open without registration

...well, at least your comments...

After being approached by a few readers, we have decided to lift the requirement to become a registered user on the SWLing Post in order to post comments. Now you can post comments without the added hassle. If you’re interested,  the reason we implemented this requirement in the early days of the blog had to do with the enormous amount of SPAM comments we received daily–literally 40+ per day! It was simply taking too much time to filter and SPAM plug-ins were (at that time) not up to the task.

So, feel free to comment!  We’d love to hear from you.

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