Where’s my missing comment?

Please consider technical issues as an explanation before leaping to claims of censorship, and remember that as a free press this blog has the right to decline to publish unacceptable content: the right of any person to freely express their opinions creates no obligation for a free press to publish those opinions.

Possibilities

Technical issues due to automatic filters set to catch certain word combinations:

• spamination
• automoderation

Active moderator intervention due to breaching our Comments Policy.

• Manual moderation
• NB: WordPress does not allow us to transfer comments between threads
• “Permanent” moderation

Details follow:

Technical Issues

• Spaminated

  If your comment doesn’t appear on the thread you posted it on (and there’s no message about moderation), there’s probably an issue with our spam filter so please refer to this post and then email LP.

• Automoderated

  If your comment does appear but with a message that it is awaiting moderation, then it’s been caught by the moderation filter. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve broken any rules -

  • all commentors whose details are not already in the database must have their first comment approved by a moderator before their subsequent comments will automatically be published
    (N.B.this includes changes to IP numbers that happen automatically with most ISPs, so regular commentors will also be caught sometimes)
  • plus a number of contentious and/or common spam words or more than two links per comment trigger moderation automatically

  If that’s the case, it should be fished out at the earliest available opportunity.

  Please bear in mind, though, that we don’t have full time moderators, and in fact many of us are now busier than a few years ago.

Active Moderator Intervention

IMPORTANT: Moderation decisions are not discussed on the blog. Please ask any questions you may have via email.

• Manually moderated

  If you conclude that a comment of yours has been placed in moderation for a breach of the comments policy, (which is the most likely explanation if your comment was originally published but later disappeared) then please refer to the said comments policy!

• NB: unlike some other forum frameworks, it is not possible in WordPress for moderators to simply transfer an off-topic comment on one thread to another more on-topic thread while keeping authorship attribution intact. Therefore please do not complain about being victimised when this is not done – if we could do it, we would.

• “Permanently” moderated

  If you have been commenting for a while and one day you discover that every comment you submit now sits in the moderation queue until a moderator approves it, this means that your email and/or IP number have been added to the auto-moderation filter. This action is only taken following repeated submission of unacceptable content requiring subsequent deletion/redaction by a moderator, therefore to minimise thread disruption your comments are now being pre-screened.

  If you wish for your permanently-moderated status to be reconsidered, opening an email dialogue with us is essential. Demands for explanations made on the blog will be deleted without reply.