Because it was not working correctly and so causing people aggravation, three months ago I disabled the Captcha plugin and installed an alternative that was supposed to detect spambots, and the like, and so avoid the need for a Captcha. It works well but appears to have far more false positives than the Akismet spam filter, particularly if the server is running more slowly than normal. This has caused a number of comments to have been lost, with no explanation.
I have therefore suspended the new plugin from checking comments and will now rely solely on the Akismet spam filter, unless the amount of spam gets too great. Akismet does have the occasional false positive, but not so many as the recently installed plugin seems to have had, and at least now I can approve a comment if it has been intercepted incorrectly, unlike with the recent plugin.
My apologies for any inconvenience this issue has caused.
Thank you Gaufrid for all your assiduous behind-the-scenes TLC for this site
Like somebody mentioned in yesterday’s Guardian posts, I found that some of my posts disappeared but pressing the back arrow brought my comments back and pressing Post Comment a second time then worked. Go figure.
Hi Gaufrid – Yes, I’ve lost more than several posts – the first that went missing (that I knew of) was for a recentish Arachne. My post was at variance with the general view – I thought it might be provocative and hesitated before posting. I genuinely thought you might have barred it!
I realised there could be another reason when others mysteriously disappeared and assumed it was at my end.
All explained now – many thanks for the enlightenment!
I’ve just had an odd one. I submitted a comment, which triggered the “duplicate comment” warning. Sure enough, my commentwas there, but the system (not me!) had tried to submit it a second time.