Spam Dish by Sam MotteramForums, blog comments, email; you try your best to interact with your favourite sites and authors and somehow they don't seem to notice you. Your valuable input just disappears into a black hole. It's very dis-spiriting.

That 'black hole' is most likely the Spam bucket over at the site server; given the vast amount of junk mail and other electronic detritus clogging the web, it's all too easy for genuine content to fall into Spam. With sites employing highly refined, automated tools such as Akizmet and Google's filters, your comments may drop into Spam and never be reviewed by human eyeballs. If you want to add your two cents, you need to stop the quick-and-dirty and follow a few rules for decent posts.

Use a real name when posting comments - not necessarily your actual name, but A name. Blanks in the name field or "anonymous" are likely to bounce straight from Spam to Trash without a review betwixt.
Pseudonyms or handles may be scrutinised by moderators (because they are frequently used by trolls), but it is better to get into the manual review list than not at all. "A. N. Onymouse" or variations of will probably fall foul of the anti-Spam dictionary of most sites.

Much of the flood of traffic from spam-bots contains dubious advertising:

  • financial assistance (unregulated loans, credit, mortgages)
  • luxury designer brands (mostly fakes)
  • prescription medication (Cialis, Viagra top of the list).

If you want to refer to these medicines or designer brands in a comment, manipulate the spelling so that the automated tools don't drop it in the Spam bucket. Inserting a special characters * _ - / or some such makes it human readable but off-list of the Spam filters. The robo-spammers don't do this much as they rely on instant-eyeball recognition of Joe Public.

Take care that your posts don't themselves look like flagrant advertising (particularly of big brand names). Filter rules can be quite tight when exlcuding posts contianing multiple web-links and no substantive content. By all means post recommendations for products and services (but declare personal interests for the sake of disclosure) and don't re-post multiple copies.

If you post a comment that vanishes into the black hole, you can always post another comment titled "Moderator HELP!" or similar, as most site operators value user content and will attempt to rescue it. Don't go ape at them (nobody likes abuse) and bear in mind time-zone differences and the scarcity of 24-7 support on most sites.

Now; entertain us, inform us, compliment us; we're all ears. The Editors

Image: Spam Dish By Neil Motteram from San Francisco, USA (Spam) CC-BY-SA 2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)