As I pointed out in a post last month, a fair number of comments are tagged as Trash by the anti-spam filter, which we have no control over. We get up to hundreds of spam/trash comments per day, and unfortunately some legit comments get trapped. We check the Trash file regularly and will retrieve your comment, sooner or later. Leaving duplicate comments just makes our job more difficult, because then we have to check if one of them made it through, or was already retrieved.
Thanks for you patience.
Sorry. Guilty as charged before. Won’t do that again.
The reason for duplicate comments, in my case anyway is the time it takes to see a post online. Maybe if there was a clear indication that it is being processed would help eliminate that problem.
Please take this post as your clear indication. That is: please adjust your expectations a bit. If you don’t see your comment immediately, go off and do something else awhile; it’ll almost certainly be up eventually.
OK, so now Fred knows to wait. Many other commenters don’t know this. A simple notice that your comment has been received and is being processed, along with an estimated time your comment will appear, would solve many of these issues.
Yes it would, but as far as I’m aware this kind of automatic notification is not readily feasible to implement, and manual notification would double the workload of the human moderators. Hence this post asking all readers not to post duplicate comments.
(Also: you appear to have made this comment twice. Of all the posts to leave duplicate comments in…this one, really?)
I only commented once, (with an edit before the edit period expired). Is it possible you might have a software problem?
I saw one copy come in with a timestamp of 4:08, and another with a 4:10 timestamp. In any event, notifications such as you describe cannot be provided at this time, sorry.
The way it works is that the comments go “somewhere” automated. Hopefully a regular’s comments just go into the commentary (the vast majority). Sometimes they go into the trash, some people more than others for no good or readily discernible reason. Daniel and I have had our own comments go into the trash too. The reason is somewhat nebulous but the flipside is that it’s very rare for actual spam to get posted.
There are multiple people behind the scenes here, none of whom do this for a living or compensation (just like the writing and picture taking), and whenever one of them is at/in the site takes a look at the comments and the trash. If something is in there, we fish it out and make it live and remove the non-comments that are also in there. Sometimes we are all asleep or doing other things, sometimes (as in this particular moment in time) there are multiple people here at once. Your actual comment that is being responded to right now was one of the ones that was fished out, but if you had left it at 3am it might have taken a bit longer (or not, you might be surprised at some of the hours some of us keep). Once fished out manually it goes live pretty much immediately, nobody does the fishing and then goes away for a bit and then comes back to make it live.
Regulars will see this and now understand how it works, the first timers that come after obviously not.
Paul we know your a bit frugal but your not supposed to take dumpster diving literally. Lol! 😉
I believe that is Daniel as he strikes me as more of a scrounger than Paul.
No worries, Paul.
Geez, folks, it’s a car blog, all thanks to the good graces of Mr. Niedermeyer. We’re not exchanging comments vital to national security here. Between WordPress, the Internet, etc stuff happens…let’s have some forbearance.
How else would I presume that another reader is older and less tech-literate than me?
May I suggest as punishment for re-offenders, write out 100 times “I must not post duplicate comments”, and post it. Twice.
I don’t do duplicates, but I do have lots of comments that disappear upon posting (seems poss something to do with timing from Oz, as it’s long been the case). Do I need to ask for it to be found, ie; is that helping or hindering in terms of the workload that I’m acutely conscious is done by volunteers if you’re all doing regular trash trawls anyway?
Yes, very many of your comments almost invariably end up in the trash bin. It would be interesting to know just what about them triggers the algorithm of the filter. Hmm.
An unkind algorithm might sense it’s the amount of trash in the comments I post, and I would be the first to agree, but I don’t believe you’d employ an unkind one – would you?
Of course not. But then these algorithms were hired by an outside staffing agency. Maybe we need to have a conversation with them about the quality of their screening. We need kinder and gentler algorithms. That way my comments will more likely end up in the trash than yours.
Come to think of it, not one of my comments has ever ended up in the Trash. That clearly shows we have faulty algorithms.
Will do, simply click send once and let the magic happen even if I don’t immediately see it. Which oddly enough happens about half the time.
My above “magic doesn’t happen” reply posted promptly.
Following this reply I will try another.
Not sure if anyone will see this, but I just got popped by a “dupe” filter, stating that I posted a duplicate comment. Don’t think I hit “Post Comment” more than once, but it looks like there is now a filter to stop such activities?