Comment Spam and False Positives
Every successful social media system I have ever been involved with has to tackle the problem of spam. It is one of signs that you are successful. When the spammers start targeting you, it is a sign you have arrived.
Over the years Disqus has had to fight comment spam and they've done a pretty good job of it. Their spam filters catch most of the comment spam. Occasionally one gets through and I manually delete it, most often via email with a reply with just the word "delete" in it (without the quotes).
In the past month, I've noticed a significant uptick in the amount of comment spam being targeted at the AVC comment threads. More is coming in and more is getting through. I asked the Disqus team about this a few weeks ago and they told me they are seeing a significant uptick in spam across all of their communities and they are dedicating additional development resources to fighting it.
One of the costs of tightening up the spam filters is you get false positives. And thanks to Harry Demott, I noticed this morning that a bunch of legit comments by AVC regulars had been marked as spam. I just went in and manually approved those comments and notified Disqus of this issue. I suspect they tightened something up in the past week a bit too much.
If you have been having trouble getting a comment to post in the past few days, this is likely the source of the issue. If it continues to happen, please let me know via email. I will make sure to visit the spam page in my Disqus moderation panel regularly for the next few days to make sure this isn't continuing to happen. And I am confident that Disqus will get this fixed in short order.
