Why are There no Comments on this Blog?
There seems to be a technical problem with leaving comments on WordPress.com (the host of this blog) — since about 6 weeks you cannot post any comments on this blog. If you want to leave a comment, please e-mail it to me and I’ll append it to the appropriate posting.
For the technically inclined: WordPress.com uses a spam-detection service called Akismet, which cannot be deactivated. If everything worked OK, each comment would be checked by Akismet and get classified as “spam” or “no spam.” The “no spam” comments from first-time posters get held for moderation indefinitely, comments from posters with at least one approved comment are immediately visible. The “spam” comments go to the spam queue, and I have to either delete them or mark them as “not spam.” If I take no action within 15 days, the “spam” comments get deleted indefinitely.
The problem is that in the last 6 weeks Akismet has marked all comments (90 in total) as “spam,” but the spam queue has only shown 6 comments. The other 84 are gone, and surely not all of these were spam. In fact, from the 6 comments that I did see, 2 were good ones.