If You Post a Message and It Doesn’t Appear
Cidu Bill on Jul 3rd 2009
You don’t have to repost it, because it was shunted into either the Moderation file or the Spam file and I’ll spot it within a few hours and get it online.
These are a few of the things that get a post automatically moved to the Moderation file: two or more links, and certain words including “suck” (which is a real painwhen we have a comic about vampires), “sex” and “penis.” A post goes directly into the Spam folder if it contains racial epithets, or any of the more common sexual terms, or if it was written by Morris Keesan. I have no idea what the WordPress spam filter has against Morris — there’s nothing hidden in either his name, his e-mail address or his ISP name that should trigger this sort of problem — but nonetheless…
Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, spam | 24 responses so far
Frosted Donut Jul 3rd 2009 at 05:13 pm 1
So if Morris Keesan were to post a comment about having sex with vampires while sucking on a milk shake, it might disappear into a parallel spam filter universe?
Rainey Jul 3rd 2009 at 07:03 pm 2
@CIDU Bill: When did you install this “filter”? A few weeks ago, one of my posts comtained one “naughty” word ( though not used in a naughty way ) and my post went online right away anyway.
Cidu Bill Jul 3rd 2009 at 07:21 pm 3
Rainey, the filters were always there. Sometimes, if I’m online, I spot and approve “held” posts almost immediately.
Arthur Jul 3rd 2009 at 07:32 pm 4
For a while, all of my posts were going to either the spam or moderate files. I changed to a
Yahoo e-mail address instead of one from spamgourmet, and my posts went through immediately.
As it says on the spamgourmet site: “some webmasters configure their sites to reject our addresses,
and it seems like they come here to see which domains to reject. (If you *are* one of these people,
why do you do this? What good does it really do for you, and don’t you have better things to do?)”
Bill, I know you have no control over Wordpress’s filters, but it would be nice to know why
they suspect that people who don’t want to get spam are themselves spammers.
Cidu Bill Jul 3rd 2009 at 07:50 pm 5
Arthur, it’s the word “spam” that does it.
Cidu Bill Jul 3rd 2009 at 07:54 pm 6
Frosted Donut, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I had to retrieve your post from the spam folder.
furrykef Jul 3rd 2009 at 09:59 pm 7
Bill — well, pretty much nobody ever sends spam from an address with the word “spam” in it (unless they’re masquerading as some kind of anti-spam thing… damn hypocrites), so that doesn’t really make sense. Moreover, I assume spamgourmet accounts cannot send e-mail; it only forwards e-mail you receive.
If a website blocks a spamgourmet account, it’s highly suspicious, because the only real reason to do that would be if the site itself wants to spam to those addresses. Otherwise, they shouldn’t even care, and if they care anyway (no doubt some people do), they’re terminally clueless.
- Kef
Arthur Jul 3rd 2009 at 10:07 pm 8
“Arthur, it’s the word “spam” that does it.”
No, because I used one of their aliases. But the quarantining stopped as soon as I used
a different address.
I mentioned my old problem in part because it might throw some light on Morris Keesan’s.
Heather D Jul 3rd 2009 at 10:31 pm 9
It was probably my post that prompted this announcement — although given the subject matter of the comic, possibly there were others as well.
Thanks for the explanation. It would be nice, ideally, to have a little note about that when we submit the comment — a simple “thanks, your comment has been received and is being queued for moderation.” When it simply just doesn’t appear, my natural inclination is to assume that I hit the “back” button instead of “submit”.
Which, yes, I have done on numerous occasions, including posting on my own blog and thereby losing the entire (unsaved of course) post.
How easy it is to make that simple comment-received thing appear, I don’t know. A knowledgeable wordpress guru could probably tweak it easily enough for you…
Cidu Bill Jul 3rd 2009 at 10:52 pm 10
Kef, the Spamfilter Gods must agree with you, because the word “spam” no longer throws comments into the spam folder. Obviously.
Morris Keesan Jul 4th 2009 at 10:32 am 11
Bill, posts from me don’t automatically go into the spam folder. Only about 99.9% of the time. Occasionally, one gets posted immediately.
Arthur, my email address is in a .edu domain (forwarding address supplied by the university that gave me my undergraduate degrees), unlikely to be one that’s in anyone’s list of spam sources (though not impossible). I’ll be switching to a different .edu domain soon, and we’ll see whether that makes any difference.
Heather D., I recently posted a comment on another blog, which looked like it was using a Wordpress template, and I immediately saw my post, along with a notice that it had been submitted for moderation. So at least some Wordpress-looking templates have that capability.
Morris Keesan Jul 4th 2009 at 10:34 am 12
Okay. I just posted a comment using my regular email address. Now I’m trying this one, using an alternate address with a different domain. If this goes through right away, that’s a big metaphorical smoking gun pointing at my address.
Frosted Donut Jul 4th 2009 at 11:23 am 13
Heather D: There is a notification (or at least I saw one on my spam-filled first post). A line appears at the top indicating the comment is being held for moderation.
CIDU Bill: Yeah, no surprise on my part. I am surprised you were able to retrieve it from whatever dark, dank hole it disappeared to.
Cidu Bill Jul 4th 2009 at 02:58 pm 14
For the record, Morris’s second post went right through, while I had to rescue the first one from the spam folder.
And don’t even get me started on people who write Morris’.
David N Jul 4th 2009 at 03:31 pm 15
For kicks, I ran “Morris Keesan” through an anagram program. Choice among them were “Snakier Mores”, “Rake More Sins” and my favorite, “Moaner Kisser”. Bill, maybe your spam filter is trying to become an AI and is in the anagram/hidden meaning phase. Sooner or later it will want to play chess and Global Thermonuclear War. Then it will start measuring our posts based on intelligence and ability to express one’s self.
Which means if this post gets through, it hasn’t gotten there yet.
Cidu Bill Jul 4th 2009 at 03:34 pm 16
So you’re saying, David, that next week WordPress becomes self-aware?
David N Jul 4th 2009 at 03:51 pm 17
Just hope and pray it doesn’t become self-moderating, Bill.
But in the spirit of the day, this day, July 4th - in case it does become self-aware here goes:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all posts are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Comic Understanding.”
Todd Jul 4th 2009 at 04:11 pm 18
All my posts always get “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” I don’t know if it’s because of my fake e-mail address (which I use at Bill’s recommendation), or because something I posted was interpreted as inflammatory.
As for the possessive, I was always taught that if a word or name ended in “s”, you add only the apostrophe. (Then again, I was also told to include punctuation inside the quotations, and you can see how I follow that rule.)
Cidu Bill Jul 4th 2009 at 04:37 pm 19
Todd, that rule applies when the word is a plural. The possessive of dogs is dogs’. But Morris isn’t a plural (unless we’re talking about more than one Morri), so it’s treated the same as any singular possessive: Morris’s
That being said, of course, many people — and many people whose job it is to know better — write Morris’; and I’m sure many of them, when confronted with their error, will use the “language is evolving” argument. But evolution of language doesn’t not mean that if enough people do something wrong, it magically becomes right. Maybe someday, but for now this is no different from people who don’t seem to understand that there and their are different words.
chuckers Jul 5th 2009 at 04:09 am 20
There are people in Commonwealth countries that will insist that Morris’ is the correct
possessive and claim up and down that Morris’s is actually incorrect grammar or an
Americanism.
I have had grief about this before as my surname ends in an ’s’ from some of my
differently educated friends.
The also spell and pronounce words like “alumininium” use the letter “hetch”
Mitch4 Jul 5th 2009 at 08:23 am 21
Todd and CIDU Bill: The *real* rule for this sort of case is that the spelling follows the pronunciation. If you give it an additional syllable (as you generally should) you write it with -s+apostrophe+s. If you leave it at the original final sibilant without sounding another syllable (a few exceptional names), you write it with just -s+apostrophe.
And then, the descriptive (and maybe even explanatory) principle (not ‘rule’ in the normative sense anyway) goes into when we do or do not add that extra syllable.
The prescriptive part, according to the Chicago Manual of Style (though I’m an edition or two behind the current one I admit) accords with how Bill lays it out, for basic cases like Morris’s. But I urge you in Jesus’ name not to take it too far; and that would be Socrates’ position too, don’t you think? And for goodness sake, recall that you don’t even always use the apostrophe.
CIDU Bill Jul 5th 2009 at 10:58 am 22
Mitch, I’m not sure why Jesus and Socrates should be exceptions to the rule. Granted, Socrates’s sounds awkward, but the best solution to that sort of thing is to simply rephrase the sentence to avoid the issue.
When writing fiction, I make a point of avoiding names that end in “s,” as a way of sidestepping this problem.
CIDU Bill Jul 5th 2009 at 12:31 pm 23
Mitch, if spelling followed pronunciation, the United States would need at least a dozen different editions of the dictionary — and we’d have a state named Organ.
Mitch4 Jul 5th 2009 at 04:08 pm 24
Please, I would hope you know I’m not taking quite that silly a position—that spelling does or should always follow speech. And you’ve given the classic (and IMO correct) argument against so-called phonetic spelling reform.
But still it’s a good principle (unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Derridean) that the spoken language has in many ways a primacy over writing or other derved frms of language. For me among many others that is not absolute of course, and there are many interesting things that can be said about written language that do not derive from equivalent points about speech. Yet in general most description as well as analysis begins with the spoken language and may beadapted or extended to writing, derivatively. This is a totally accepted starting point in any American school of thought in Linguistics, and even for many Continental linguists (albeit not, as acknowledged, for insane Parisians).
So consider for instance the descriptive rule for the English spoken -s inflection giving the plural for regular nouns, and the phonologically equivalent one for the 3rd person singular present of regular verbs. [And dare I say, for the simple possessive?] There are four cases, or some would merge the last two and say there are three:
1. If the stem ends in a sibilant consonant (voiced or unvoiced), append /@z/.
2. If the stem ends in any other unvoiced consonant, append /s/.
3. If the stem ends in any other voiced consonant, append /z/.
4. If the stem ends in a vowel [necessarily voiced], append /z/.
(Items 3 and 4 could be merged since they are triggered by voicing and it doesn’t matter vowel vs. consonant. But it’s clearer this way.)
Now what is the rule or principle for the written form? (Which is somewhere between fully descriptive and fully prescriptive.) It’s actually simpler, because the orthography has -s whether the sound is /s/ or /z/ … unless you’re exceedingly hip and have some “warez” to offer, or the like.
The rule for the written forms is actually much simpler because of that, and cases 2,3, and 4 merge. There is a slight complication because of silent -e and other spelling particulars of spelling that disguise the sound.
But which is the right way to put the sibilant rule?
1A. If the stem ends in a sibilant LETTER, add -es.
1B. If the stem ends in a sibilant SOUND, add the syllable /@s/, by adding the letters -es unless the written stem already ends in -e, in which case add just -s.
(And of course “2. Otherwise, add -s.”)
The 1A and 1B will disagree in just a few cases, and most style sheets will go with the form suggested by 1B. (Think of adopted French words ending in silent -s.) But even if you go for 1A, it should be clear that the phonological description is more fundamental, and the written description/prescription derives from it by collapsing cases.