Recently in Blog Administrative Stuff Category

It appears Maggie's Farm believes any comments I write are spam, so nothing I post in the way of comments ever makes it onto their site. This is what I see when I click on the 'Submit Comment' tab:

Spam Prevention: Invalid message.

Your comment could not be added because comments for this entry have either been disabled, you entered invalid data, or your comment was caught by anti-spam measures.

What the hell? Of course there is no 'Contact Us' information, so I can't even ask them what's going on or why my comments are considered spam. This is not the first time I've had this happen, as I haven't been able to comment for quite some time.

In this case my comment was in response to this post about teens and summer jobs.

My comment:

Here in central New Hampshire it's not a question of kids not looking for work (though I have no doubt that's a small part of it). Instead it's a dearth of jobs.

Many of the jobs normally filled by teens have been taken by adults, some taking the jobs to supplement income, and others taking any job they can get in order to pay the bills.

That has made it more difficult for teens to find jobs, particularly since most of the adults are more conscientious about their jobs.

My son works at one of the local farms, as he has since he was 12. This year many of the field hands are adults. Most are doing it because it's the only work available. (Some of them have problems taking orders from my 17 year old son, but as the owner of the farm tells them "He knows what he's doing. You don't He's a farmer. You aren't.") But they do the work and they do it better than many of the teens who worked there in the past.

Would any of you out there consider that spam? And it isn't like this is an old entry considering it was posted just yesterday. I even tried commenting on an even more recent post and got the same response.

There have been a few questions about the comment system used here at Weekend Pundit since I changed it back in July, so I'm going to post an updated version of the why's and how's. There have been a few problems with logging in for registered users, so after looking over the actual registration process, I realized there was a problem and this update should (hopefully) solve it. The updated section of our policy and registration procedure will be in bold.

From the July 23, 2010 post:

After being buried every day with spamments requiring moderation (between 100 and 300 per day) I decided it was time to change the comment policy here at Weekend Pundit. More than a few of you wishing to comment were being drowned out by the spam masquerading as comments, meaning I couldn't find your comments among all the crap filling my e-mail Inbox.

So here goes:

From now on anyone wishing to comment must register in order to do so. If you click on the Comment link on any post the login request will pop up. Make sure to select "Movable Type" under the 'Sign in using...' header on the Login page. If you use the other options - Open ID, LiveJournal, or Vox - the registration will fail. If you are not already registered click on the Sign Up link in the lower right hand corner and fill in the blanks on the form. Once you are registered and after I enable your account any comments you post will appear immediately without need for moderation by either Brent, Bagheera, or me.

Everyone is welcome to comment, even those who may vehemently disagree with us. It makes things more interesting for all involved.

A Warning: Management (meaning me) reserves the right to ban abusers of the comment system, such abuses being defined as but not limited to threatening authors or other commenters - explicitly or otherwise, committing acts of libel, or promoting criminal acts.

If you don't like it, that's just too bad. It's our blog, not yours.

Due to a snafu, Weekend Pundit and GraniteGrok were unreachable from about 10PM last night until this morning. The snafu has since been corrected...since you can actually get here now.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program....

After being buried every day with spamments requiring moderation (between 100 and 300 per day) I decided it was time to change the comment policy here at Weekend Pundit. More than a few of you wishing to comment were being drowned out by the spam masquerading as comments, meaning I couldn't find your comments among all the crap filling my e-mail Inbox.

So here goes:

Over the next few days or so I will be doing some housecleaning here at Weekend Pundit, meaning I will be making a few minor changes in the appearance of the blog as well as updating links and maybe adding a few new features. So if things look a little weird from time to time that's just me tweaking templates or widgets or links. Please bear with me on this.

Thank you for your support.

It appears Movable Type has been 'eating' comments, taking actual non-spam comments and kicking them into the Spam Comments folder. It wasn't until a new reader asked about why several of her comments were never approved and/or never appeared that I looked into why they'd all up and disappeared. (All fixed now, Paulina! At least I think so....)

So I spent a couple of hours going through the Comments and Spam folders, setting things to rights...at least for comments posted over the last week or so. I only have another 1360 comments to go through.