What should I do if SK2 eats a legit comment?
First of all: don’t panic.
SK2 is usually good at sorting out ham from spam, but every once in a while, it will get confused and flag a perfectly fine message as spam.
Here is what you should do:
Recover your comment
To recover your comment, it is essential that you use SK2’s tools, not WP’s built-in comment management screen. The latter will work just fine at recovering your comment, but will skip the training part of the recovery that ensures SK2 doesn’t make the same mistake again.
To do a comment recovery through SK2, you have two ways:
- In SK2’s digest email (provided you have enabled this module), click on the “Recover” link.
- Or you can directly go to Admin screen >> Recent Spam Harvest, tick the box next to your comment(s) and click on: “recover selected”.
Understand the Why
Whenever SK2 flags a comment as spam, it will always list the reasons: blacklisting, abnormally high number of comments, etc. It is usually a good idea to go see what it had to say about your false positive, in order to make sure its error was based on reasonable motives:
After recovering your comment, go to Admin screen >> Approved Comments.
You should see your recently-recovered comment somewhere toward the top (if it was the last comment submitted, it will be at the top, otherwise, it could be farther down the list).
- If using Firefox, Safari or any other half-decent browser: Hover with your mouse over the number in the Karma column.
- If using MSIE: you may need first to untick the “Enable ‘hovering’ in spam report tables” advanced option, then go back to Approved Comments.
Under the karma score there should appear a whole bunch of reasons why SK2 thought the comment may or may not have been spam (green is positive points, red, huh, negative). Associated with each reason, a breakdown of points taken or given are listed. If that comment was mistakenly eaten chances are the total of its points is less than zero: have a look at the reasons why and, if they do not make sense, consider contacting me for a bug report.
Note: SK2.2 had a small, known bug that would make it miscategorize comments linking to blogspot.com blogs. This has been fixed in version 2.3, upgrade if you run into this problem.
Ensuring it never happens again
Normally, merely recovering the comment through SK2 will ensure this particular commenter gets whitelisted and shouldn’t have any trouble the following time commenting. If any of the reasons the comment was caught in the first place is a problem you could fix (for example: the number of links was above the threshold you set), you can try tweaking the settings to make SK2 more lenient in this area.
Mystery said,
August 14, 2007 at 4:08 am
i have been doing this name and email and it has been getting black listed please how do i get it on whitelist.
Laurence said,
October 22, 2007 at 10:00 am
I just had a comment from a friend flagged as SPAM. The main negative Karma deduction was:
-9: Commenter granularity (based on IP): 1 old comment(s) (karma avg: 3.000000), 6 recent comment(s) (karma avg: 2.170000).
I’m not sure whether SK2 counts only comments that have been approved in these totals. If so, this -9 deduction doesn’t make sense to me. This IP belongs to a person who frequently posts on my blog. The fact that he has made 6 recent comments would seem a positive thing to me. But I’m guessing this has to do with the “old comments / new comments ratio”?
Did this happen because he hasn’t commented much in thepast but just started commenting on my blog fairly often? If so, is there a way I can be more lenient about that pattern?
OK I think maybe I’m starting to answer my own question. Under “Snowball Effect”, if I lower the number of days (currently 21) in which I regularly check comments, or lower the “more than X comments” number, or lower the old/new coefficient, any of these changes should make the false positive I got today a little less likely. Correct?
Thanks - love the plugin.
The Hermit said,
November 21, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Laurence, The way I read it, if you lower “more than X comments” number, it becomes more likely to be flagged, not less, given a precise-time-period-repeating submission from the same source. I’m not certain about the old/new coefficient. Once long ago I tried to understand the algorithm used, but became confused by the programming….
Noel said,
December 10, 2007 at 4:59 pm
OK, I’m stuck. I accidentally hit “flag comment as SPAM” in the notification email on a legitimate comment. I can’t figure out how to recover it. I can’t get it to list in the “Recent Spam Harvest.” Perhaps because it should have been whitelisted and it wouldn’t have scored very poorly. Any ideas?
Noel said,
December 10, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Got it. I went back to the email and hit the “flag comment as SPAM” link again. That caused it to pop up in the harvest pile and I could recover it.
Just thought I’d post this in case someone else made the same problem.