As with any website that allows for reader feedback, MotoringFile fights a daily battle against spam. And as the popularity of the site has grown, the spam issues has grown exponentially. What started as one or two spam comments a day has grown well into the 100’s.

When the issue blew up last year we were faced with three choices:

* Shut down comments completely
* Shut down comments on all posts after one week
* Keep comments as they are and use some industrial strength filtering software to catch as much spam as possible.

As you might have guessed we went with the latter. For the most part it’s been pretty successful. In fact I’d be surprised if one of our users has actually seen comment spam on MF in the past year.

The downside to all this filtering is that some comments need to be moderated (due to embedded links or IP addresses) and others get lost altogether in the Akismet filtering sofware. We try to filter the filtering software to make sure that no real comments get snagged but enevitably at least one does every day.

Why do some comments get tagged as spam and others not? To be honest there’s an incredible amount of variables that go into the equation and if I tried to explain it not only would I go cross-eyed but you’d stop reading this post. Let’s just say smarter people than I built it and maintain it and for 99.5% of the time, it’s perfect.

So if you can’t figure out why your comment isn’t showing right away, don’t worry, we’re not singling you out. That’s just our filters being a little trigger happy. It’ll be there eventually.