So, I just had an interesting Akismet experience. I posted this reply to someone, and it was reported as “awaiting approval”. I’ve had this happen in the past on similar posts I thought were uncontroversial, and on one I reached out to @orenwolf who told me “Discourse uses Akismet to filter posts for content” and it was an artifact of that.
I deleted the post, and then tried reposting parts of it to see what would and wouldn’t cause it to be held. Finally, deleting the quote from the other user and the clause with the word “troll” in it worked (after which I edited it back in). Obviously, Akismet decided I was being uncollegial to someone else (instead of vice versa), and acted accordingly. This is, as they say in England, “too clever by half”.
(OK, happened again with this post; just the word “troll” was the trigger!)
It was kind of humorous when a post of mine got caught up in moderation for that reason… in the middle of a discussion about preventing drive-by under-bridge dwellers through paying to comment. The word was relevant to the topic!
My comment did post, it just took a few minutes… but it was still funny. Now I know not to use one of this site’s five-letter-words.
Ironically, the comment I just posted here got held in moderation because the forbidden term was in the quoted part. Which I really should have figured out before pressing the Reply button!
Yep. There are multiple spam-and-content protections in place. They are pretty effective, but of course some topics necessarily use words that result in posts being held for moderation.
We try to get those approved as quickly as possible. The vast majority of posts caught are indeed drive-by troublemakers or spammers.
Watching words make sense; there are certain terms that I just can’t see people ever using in good faith.
On the other hand the community does need to be aware of this facet of the moderation policy so they understand why they might get temporarily caught up in the dragnet.
