A couple of people have emailed me saying that their comment was not posted to my blog. I have WordPress set to require all comments from a person to be approved, although no further approval is needed for that person to leave subsequent comments. I do not censoring your comments at all. In fact, I let all genuine comments through, troll or not.

So what is happening to the comments that never appear? I have been using two measures to counter spam. Firstly, all posts are closed for commenting after 30 days. Spam does not start arriving on most posts for about a week, and really becomes abundant after about 20 days, so this gets rid of most spam. Secondly, I have been using the Askimet plug-in. This was doing a very good job at sorting spam from non-spam. However, the set-up required at my hosting providers end for enabling SSL for my WordPress administration resulted in all my comments being recorded as coming from the one IP address. That really screws Askimet over, so all comments were being marked as spam. This requires me to manually check my spam comments before I delete them and it seems I was being over-zealous…

So attempt two at preventing spam! Enter the Quiz plugin. Anybody leaving a comment will be required to answer an “extremely tricky” question to prove they are not a spammer. I will still have the moderation turned on for the time being to ensure this catches the spam, but I will turn that off too if successful.