Are you checking all the comments left on your WordPress site? Let me tell you a little story that happened just yesterday.
A former private coaching student runs a private membership site, of which I am a member. I read his current post and left a comment. I had an inkling that something was not right when I clicked the Submit button and my cursor spun and spun and spun. Finally, his server finished processing and control returned.
Normally, moderation of comments is off seeing as this is a private membership site. I was surprised to see (or not see) that my comment was not there. I sent him a text letting him know I commented on his site in case he needed to approve it. He replied that my comment was not there.
UGH! it was lost in cyberspace. Time to try to remember my clever wit that I had just posted. I reposted, clicked submit, and again, no sight of my remarks. Time to try something else.
Since my comment was long-ish, I decided to break it up into 2 posts. The first one went through successfully, but the second one did not. I tried again. And again. I tried breaking up the second half of my post into 2 parts (a quarter of a post?). It did not go through. I tried to post it again. This time I received the message, “”Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you鈥檝e already said that!”
So, I changed the message a little bit. Nothing. At this point, I gave up. My friend said no comments were shown and “next time, I will wait a few weeks before I upgrade to a new version of WordPress.”
I knew that the upgrade had nothing to do with this… so I started to think. Why would my comments not show up. Driving home, it hit me! I sent a text with the message:
“Did they end up in the Spam comment section”
And his reply:
“U r the winner! Wow all 8 got tagged spam. I will pick the best and unflag”
When you are checking your comments, make sure to check your spam comments as well.
You can see I have 2 comments that are flagged as spam sitting there waiting for me to approve them, or trash them. The spam filters are great, but every once in a while a false positive gets triggered. This could be for a bunch of reasons such as having a suspicious (but legitimate) url included in the post or originating from an ip that is associated with spam comments (but not the poster).
Every time you check your comments, also check your spam for legitimate comments as well.
master teacher Paul –
just catching up with you blog posts and I see our little posting ‘experience’ made it as a post on your blog . . . how excellent is that . . . and I get my 15 minutes of web fame . . . vary happy to see we both learned something new that day about WP . . . and you were able to share it with others
continued success with sharing you WP knowledge with others
– young WP grasshopper
Lar –
Sometimes my mind gets a little cluttered and scattered from work 馃檪 That certainly played a part when we went back and forth!
Of course, my post included some links of questionable sites (although they were very relevant to what we were discussing). Including ‘iffy’ content like that is likely to INCREASE the probability that the comment is spam.
FIRST OF ALL I AM REALLY THANKFUL TO YOU. BUNDLE OF THANKS FOR OFFERING ME A FREE COURSE.YOU PEOPLE ARE REALLY GREAT.MORE OVER THIS IS MY FIRST VISIT TO UR WEBSITE . THANKS WITH REGARDS.
I am happy to offer the course! Let me know if you have any questions along the way! Thanks for stopping by!