Blog Post Delay
This morning Vincent pioneered new ground when he wrote extensively about blogging in Chinese. I am sure that it was authoritative and well-written, but I have no clue what he said! He later posted again to ask why his original post wasn’t immediately posted, as I had said that if you posted before, been approved, and entered your name and e-mail, the post would be immediately entered. That’s what I thought too, but while investigating why Vincent’s comment hadn’t appeared, I found a third provision that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote my post. You see, the software this blog uses is well thought out and is designed to deal with problems that come up with blogs from time to time. One problem that I have found in other blogs is what is called “comment spam”. You know that spam is e-mail advertising things that you never asked about. Comment spam is spam that is created by robot programs that look for blog sites on the web. The reason why they post on blogs is because the blog links sometimes appear on search engines like Google. When the search engine finds the links in blog comments, the standing of the websites that are in the comments go up.
To discourage people from using comment spam on blogs to create links to promote sites on search engines, the WordPress software defaults to requiring any comments that have more than two links to be sent to the moderator. Victor made a number of links to Chinese sites that talk about blogs. When I checked my mail this morning, I didn’t see the e-mail (I get the request to moderate as automatic e-mails) about approving Victor’s blog. When I did, I approved it. Because I have had he kind of nuisance comment spam in the past, I decided to leave the over two links procedure in place, instead of removing it.
Bruce