I just discovered to my horror that my spam filter (called “Akismet”) has been blocking several comments that are not spam at all, including comments from Karen Carter and Peoria Heights Mayor Mark Allen. I know that it is frustrating when you write a long comment and then it just disappears; it makes you feel like you’ve just wasted your time writing the darn thing. I sincerely apologize that you’ve experienced that on the Peoria Chronicle.
I don’t know why these comments got caught up in the filter. Akismet’s algorithm for identifying spam is a secret; overall it’s pretty good at catching things — a little too good, apparently. I have “de-spammed” your comments and they now appear in the comments sections of the appropriate posts with the proper timestamp. I would encourage all my readers to go back over the comments of some recent posts to see what may have suddenly appeared.
I will be sure to check the spam filter regularly from now on, as I certainly don’t want to miss any more comments. Thank you all for reading and for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Yes. Akismet is wonderful. I uses to spend an hour a day deleting spam and moderating comments. The drawback is that you have to go through the caught spam list once a day or so and de-spam a few legitimate comments.
To make that job easier, I suggest updating to the most recent Akismet, and chose the option to automatically delete spam caught on older posts (which is what most spam appears, anyway). It keeps you from having to browse through as many spams to get to the occasional good comment.
Thanks for letting us know what is going on. I tried to post somewhere else and it wouldn’t let me so I was starting to get a complex!
RE: The District 150 School Board Candidates. With the fiasco at hand, who is to blame? You are, if you live in the district. Problem is that you do not want to run for the school board because of all the messy stuff that comes down. Therefore the makeup of the school board is reduced to persons that are not as sharp as you are.
Karen — Akismet apparently just doesn’t like you. It seems that every comment from you gets caught. I’m trying to figure out a way to get you on an “approved commenter” list or something. Have you tried logging in to the Chronicle and becoming a registered user? That might take care of it.
It won’t. And there’s a reason for that. Some spammers will use robots to register for membership on a blog in hope of bypassing spam filters.
These suckers are absolutely determined to put their links to porn, pharmacy and insurance sites on every blog in America.
Now what? Since you posted the WCBU article with the italicized text at the bottom, all the previous blogs on the main page are showing up (on my screen) as italicized too. Are there gremlins at work here or what?
What, you don’t like italics? 😉
That was my fault. I omitted a closing tag for the italics. It’s fixed now.
Great. Thought for a minute my vision was going too.