[August 30, 2011] The Bakersfield Californian Jamie Butow column Tweet Aug 30, 2011 (The Bakersfield Californian - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Last week in my personal Yahoo email account I had more than 480 emails go directly to my spam folder. Everything from a class-action lawsuit over my non-existent hip replacement surgery to amazing ideas to make money while sitting on my couch. My personal favorite were the back-to-back emails with the subjects: "Need cash? Sell us your gold!" and "Cheap flights to Vegas! Get away now!" It had been a long week and, I'll admit, I was tempted to raid my jewelry box and take off for a long weekend. Has your email spam filter ever stopped working for a day? Holy moly. Your inbox in flooded with this junk and you're annoyed, right? I know I am. Spam is a problem any website owner or operator is familiar with, so we have several layers to help keep spam off the Bakersfield.com Network of local websites. But as fast as we implement these new procedures, spammers often find their way around them. The developers over at Disqus, the company we use to provide reader commenting on news articles, began making upgrades to their spam filter last week. As is with any change to technology, there are bugs to be worked out. Late last week and over the weekend, we received several emails from readers wondering why their comments were deleted from the site. In most cases, your comments weren't deleted, but were flagged by the system as spam and kept offline under a moderator could review. In the cases where comment were mistakenly flagged, we approved the comment right away and sent the issue on to the developers at Disqus to adjust the filter. Disqus' Ryan Valentin said, "Our spam filter has some global settings, such as how frequently a message is posted and the content. For example, comments that contain links are scrutinized more. Additionally there are forum-specific spam filters that check which comments you've marked as spam, and finds patterns between those and newly posted comments to determine if they're likely to be spam or not." Some tips on how to prevent your comment from being flagged as spam: --Limit the number of links you include to no more than three. The more you include, the more the filter will suspect your post. --Don't repost the same comment multiple times. If you're working hard to get your point across and copy and paste the same comment on multiple stories, the filter will see it and assume you're selling bootleg DVDs from Nigeria and block all your comments. The same goes for posting the same comment on the same article. Over the weekend one user tried to post the same comment several times. It included a link and was flagged for moderation, but once it didn't appear immediately online, he tried several times to repost it. Result: User flagged as a spammer. The Disqus filter uses a formula that will know when you've copied and pasted something posted elsewhere on the Internet. While we will allow you to copy a paragraph from the article to discuss in your comment, or even something from another site that you correctly attribute, we won't allow long diatribes found online that you try to pass off as your own writing. That's plagiarism. Last week the filter correctly caught several of these, but also mistakenly caught a few where you were just cutting and pasting elements of a story that you wanted to highlight in your comment. Over on the BakersfieldMom.com blog site, we recently subscribed to the Akismet global spam database. So if a spammer is flagged on another site, they can't post on our site either. So far it seems to be working as it should. New user registrations The commenting filter is just one of the measures we have in place to control spam. A few months ago we began manually approving new bakersfield.com user registrations in an effort to keep spammers off our site. That's been effective in keeping spammers away but it also means new registration requests could take up to 24 hours to approve. Just last week I had requests for four different usernames from the same overseas email address. Um, sorry. Denied. Username contains a curse word? Denied. Real name (visible only to us) obviously fake? Denied. That means you, Phoney Baloney and Buy Ritalin Online. We can and have also blocked IP addresses of known spammers. We take this step sparingly, since blocking an IP address can block out entire neighborhoods or businesses. If you find your IP address is mistakenly blocked, go to whatsmyip.org and let us know what the number is so we can review your situation. We'll be vigilant in checking the spam queue, but email [email protected] if you encounter any problems posting comments posted to any of the Bakersfield.com Network of sites. And if you're interested in seeing just how profitable the spamming, phishing and hacking business is, here is a link to a story that appeared earlier this year in Wired Magazine about a small town in Romania that is known by law enforcement agencies around the world as Hackerville. http://tinyurl.com/BakoSpamWired. Jamie Butow is the community engagement coordinator at Bakersfield.com, and the mom of an active 7-year-old boy. Email her at [email protected]. Follow her on Facebook at Facebook.com/JamieButow2, Twitter @JamieButow, and on Google+. ___ (c)2011 The Bakersfield Californian (Bakersfield, Calif.) Visit The Bakersfield Californian (Bakersfield, Calif.) at www.bakersfield.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]