Yeah, that’s one of the perils of setting out to be the biggest prick you can be in blog circles, John – some people respond in kind.

Spam Karma divides comments into three different sorts – OK, borderline and spam. The ones that are considered OK go through without any intervention from me. The ones that are considered “borderline” are manually moderated. I approve all of these unless they’re spam. The ones which are considered spam go into a folder where they’re ignored unless I spend my time going through them and manually fishing them out, which is what I did today to work out why your comments were missing. This is the way this blog has worked since I set it up.

If you’d begun the conversation with something like “comment X on thread Y seems to have disappeared, can you explain why?”, rather than something more like “you are a liar who deletes comments he disagrees with and lies about it”, we might have got this situation resolved sooner.

Anyway, whatever. The mystery is solved from my perspective; you’re welcome to continue commenting here or to fuck off, as you choose, although if you keep lying that I’m a liar then I might rethink that one. Do let me know if anything else you submit fails to get through, because heuristic software can be a bitch like that; my email is john at johnband dot org.

And now you want people to believe it’s all because of some spam blocker you don’t know how to use and the dog ate your homework. Bollocks.

And now you want people to believe it’s all because of some spam blocker you don’t know how to use and the dog ate your homework. Bollocks.

If it thinks you’re doing that, then it also retrospectively moderates your old comments.

Comments that are moderated as spam get deleted after a few months, at which point the software forgets you ever existed, and hence assumes you’re someone who’s come here /for the first time ever/ and posted lots of comments, which is again what spambots do. And to make matters worse, each time a comment gets put in the spam queue and you re-submit it, the software thinks you’re spamming again and marks your previous posts as even spammier.

I’ve turned off this part of the spam filter functionality; hopefully you’ll be able to continue being paranoid and angry while spammers continue being deterred…

Trust me, I’m already having a bizarre and vicious fight with my spam filter just to get your responses up and undeleted, which isn’t doing masses for my productivity or temper.

Much as I don’t find arguing with you especially edifying, I’d rather do without the technology randomly stealing your comments. However, there doesn’t appear to be a “whitelist” function on SpamKarma.

[I have found comments left over the last year or so from various old-time bloggers that never made it onto the site or my inbox either. Sorry Laban. Sorry Anthony. Sorry Nathalie. Sorry dsquared. Sorry, Jim Bliss. And ironically, sorry David Duff...]

I’ll respond here: even if I were much more stupid than I am, and even if I felt so threatened by your razor-sharp wit that I felt the need to delete your comments rather than allow people to see them, then I’d delete your comments without replying to the bloody things.