Hazy is Not Spam

I call her Hazy; she calls me P.C. And we call each other friends.

Thankfully, she contacted me recently to ask me a question. She thought it strange that I had not been responding to comments she left on my blog. She knows me well and knew something must be amiss if I wasn’t responding. We finally figured out that her comments of the past few weeks were being sent to my WordPress spam folder, along with all the strange symbol-names and foreign-language comments.

Her likes appeared just fine, but for some reason, her comments did not. I featured Hazy on Author Wednesday a few months back, and her post received more spam comments than any other posts to date. We’re not sure if that’s what set off the spamming of her comments or not. Thankfully, I was able to pull her comments out of the dead-end file and respond to them in my usual manner.

I’m sending out this post for a couple of reasons.

I respond to every legitimate comment on my blog. If at all possible, I respond within hours. I enjoy every single comment and want those who take the time to respond to know how much I appreciate them.
I hope if you’ve left me comments, and I haven’t responded, you’ll let me know so I can search through my folders.
If you feel your comments to other blogs go unanswered, you’ll make the effort to ask why.
Finally, if you miss a regular commenter on your blog, you’ll check into the situation.

Thanks to Hazy for bringing this situation to light.

6 responses to “Hazy is Not Spam”

marilynslagel says:

February 23, 2014 at 10:11 pm

Thanks, P.C. I had no idea WP had other folders. Guess I better be checking on things. If you failed to respond to a comment, I would definitely speak up – it would totally out of character for you.

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- P. C. Zick says:
  
  February 23, 2014 at 10:31 pm
  
  Great! I had to put a search in for Hazy’s name because it was buried deep within all those other “obvious” spam comments.
  
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Professions for PEACE says:

February 27, 2014 at 10:53 am

Such a great reminder for all us WP writers to frequently ‘go weeding’ which is what I call it when I empty out my Spam folder, after a bit of sifting through to look for real readers flowering in there. As with gardening, one must stay on top of it or it gets totally out of hand. So glad you and Hazy found each other again through the mass of ‘weeds’. Cheers, Gina

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- P. C. Zick says:
  
  February 27, 2014 at 11:05 am
  
  It is a good idea to go spam surfing. WP doesn’t catch all the spammer comments and then as I recently discovered they catch some that shouldn’t be there at all. We’re still trying to figure out why Hazy’s comments turned into spam, not only here but on several other WP sites as well.
  
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Hazy Shades of Me says:

March 1, 2014 at 9:44 pm

Hey! I think I’m here! Ha ha. I believe…hope?…I have been de-marked as a spammer.

I’d like to thank you for posting this for me…for all of us…it’s more upsetting than I thought it would be, to be invisible. Makes me appreciate, all the more, this great blogging community!

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- P. C. Zick says:
  
  March 2, 2014 at 9:40 am
  
  I think we might have solved the problem. I don’t know how, so let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. I felt as if one of my lifelines had been cut with gone! Welcome back, Hazy.
  
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