Caring for a Three Legged Dog or Cat

megstamum said
...when I try and submit it again, it says duplicate comment detected...

No need for dread... The "duplicate comment" error indicates that the comment did indeed post the first time, but was likely spammed. And this particular case does not come as a surprise. The content of the comment included "xxx".

We checked your spammed comment queue, and sure enough the comment is there. We have left it there for you, so you can see where these comments end up, and how to approve them, or delete them permanently. (It is good practice to empty the spam comments periodically.)

1. Visit Meg's blog Dashboard -> Comments.
2. Click/tap the Spam link.
3. Review and approve any legitimate comments by clicking Not Spam.
   (For comments from previously unapproved users, these will then also need to be approved)
4. Click Empty Spam to delete all spam comments

If you would like us to approve the comment for you, we can certainly do that.

Please note that once a user has a comment spammed on a blog, future comments from that user (on that blog) may be more susceptible to getting spammed again. Akisment (the anti-spam plugin) is smart, and will "learn" how to separate the spam from the ham (false positives like this) over time.

Hope this helps! Please advise if problems persist.

Note To Anyone searching this Tech Support forum about comments not appearing or the Duplicate Comment error: Check your Spam queue if this occurs on your own blog, or send a message to the blog owner if it happens when posting comments on other Tripawds Blogs .

megstamum said
I've now replied to all the other comments on the same blog post and every single one went to spam...I don't understand why this is suddenly happening....

admin said
Please note that once a user has a comment spammed on a blog, future comments from that user (on that blog) may be more susceptible to getting spammed again. Akisment (the anti-spam plugin) is smart, and will "learn" how to separate the spam from the ham (false positives like this) over time.

megstamun said
...generally when you've approved a comment from someone once you don't need to keep on doing so. It's aa though we've been blacklisted 

Exactly. The same thing goes for for spammed comments as for previously approved comments, though Akismet is a bit more proactive and aggressive on the spam side – since that'ts what they do – often resulting in false positives. Once user's email address and IP address have been flagged as spam, Akismet algorithms (on their servers) may take some time to re-learn the validity of future comments.

Unfortunately the public and website administrators have no control over Akismet nor access to any sort of dashboard for moanaging blacklists. We have researched possible spam comment whitelist plugins, and the only solutions is rather old and no longer developed which causes security concerns if activated. Deactivating Akismet is also not an option.

Long story short, hopefully this will resolve itself over time.

There was no guarantee that the suggestions in that 10 year old blog post would be the magic bullet. We doubt those steps have made matters any worse, though they they may have caused some confusion – in people and bots alike.

While Akismet will learn from false positives, the education is not immediate. Your stats indicate 9 false positives, all this month, most in the past 24 hours, over the life of Meg's blog. Our only explanation at this time is that we must wait and see, while continuing to instruct Akismet what is spam, and what is ham.

We will keep monitoring this and investigate the issue further as time allows. Thank you for your patience.