CUNY Academic Commons

She replies:

"I am attaching the links for the two discussion boards where this is happening. As far as items that were flagged though, I’ve been going in and approving them so they aren’t as spam anymore. But there are some in the ‘pending’ stage that I didn’t approve since it was students trying to post the same post multiple times (so I only approved one to go to the discussion board).

https://lehmanpsy30501.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts/

https://lehmanpsy30502.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts/

Is that in line with what you were looking for?"

Thanks, Marilyn. This is helpful. What she means, technically, is that she's using a Commons site for her classes; she's creating new posts for discussion prompts, and then having students respond by commenting on the posts. These comments are being flagged as spam by Akismet. I can't tell by looking why Akismet is blocking them - it's a black box.

If the commenters were logged into the Commons, we may be able to help, by excluding logged-in comments from Akismet screening. Given the current setup, though, there may not be much we can do. By unspamming, you train Akismet to recognize good content. By then approving the comments, you add the commenters to the list of users who have had at least one approved comment, which Akismet might take into account when scanning for spam.

Is the administrator receiving email notifications when comments are held for spam?

I'm copying Ray here because the pattern - overaggressive moderation by Akismet - parallels part of #11160, and there may be a larger issue here.

I'm going through my old tickets. I think this can be closed.