General

As a fairly-frequent commenter on other people’s blogs, I know how frustrating it can be when I’ve spent a few minutes working on the perfect riposte, only to have it disappear somewhere in the void. So I thought I’d explain a little bit about how comments on johnaugust.com work, and why they sometimes don’t show up right away.

In the beginning, there was spam. It cluttered your box. Then came blogs, and soon followed comment spam. These are short, meaningless posts that generally link to some site involving gambling or prescription drugs. In most cases, the comments are not made by actual humans, but rather by automated programs (bots), who scurry around the web looking for open comment systems.

In order to keep this site from being overrun with comment spam, there are a few safeguards built-in:

1. In order to comment, you have to type the required word from the 16-word phrase. This is sort of a home-brewed solution, but it’s worked fairly well.
2. Comments that have certain words (or combinations of words) are flagged for review. These comments are logged in the system, but won’t show up until the administrator (me) approves them.
3. The same applies to comments with three or more links in them.
4. Comments from certain spammy IP addresses are automatically flagged for review.

The three-links rule is often what trips people up.

If you’ve posted something and it hasn’t shown up, be patient. The system will automatically kick me an email when a comment gets flagged for review. Unless I’m swamped, I’ll usually get around to approving it the same day.

Thanks for posting.

Technorati spam blogs
New comment spam blocker
Ingenious comment spam booster

Approximately five percent of visitors to johnaugust.com arrive from Google or one of the other search engines. Thanks to server statistics, I can see exactly what search phrase brought them here.

Some people were clearly ego-surfing: searching for their names as they might appear in comments sections, for instance. But other people, well, I have no idea why they thought this was a site for them. Keep in mind: these are things people actually typed in Google, which led them here.

Here’s a sampling of the best from the top 1000:

1. gay girls
2. the ride pimper
3. blow movie quotes
4. vlad girls
5. regaining confidence
6. things about daniel wallace
7. define:motivation
8. i expect you to die
9. what does i.e. mean?
10. teen girls first time
11. how much do screenwriters make
12. goddamn mongolian
13. tasha would
14. jodie foster movie deaf
15. i am forty times this many t shirt
16. what does story plot mean
17. bad dialogue, great movies
18. rollerblade dance
19. depiction of the english in braveheart
20. people who hate disgusting chewing gum
21. girls gay
22. low rider pimper
23. what is the different between the firefox and the internet explorer?
24. mongolian geisha
25. monuments and anthems
26. how to write good teen slasher screenplay
27. chinese male sex
28. this is the sort of english up with which i will not put.
29. english words with latin numbers in them
30. define:cutty
31. persians are not arabs
32. twips per page
33. do you have the lines to the movie willie wonka the chocolate factory
34. jimmy choos
35. why does css in internet explorer 5 for mac suck
36. willy wonker
37. gramatical ruls
38. men talking about girls
39. worst unsold screenplay
40. arabian sexy princes