CUNY Academic Commons

The content of the error message suggests that this is not, in fact, the same issue as comments being blocked by a spam filter. Instead, they're being blocked because the system thinks that they're duplicates. To diagnose further, we need to know exactly what site/post we're talking about, so that we can examine the content of the comments. If they are indeed the same (like every student answers "Yes" or "No") then we may need to build in some bypass for the duplicate check. If they're not duplicates, then this could be a case where students are double-submitting their comments.

About 1 out of 5 of my students get a "duplicated response" message when they try and comment on the class blog each week.

As I mentioned in #12363:

Whenever Akismet marks a comment as spam, the user isn't aware of this. So the user will continue trying to post the same comment and will therefore receive the duplicate comment message.

Akismet doesn't show the user what happens when a comment is marked as spam, presumably to prevent spammers from knowing anything. But for legitimate users, this isn't a great user experience.

I'm not sure what we can do to make this better. I'll see how hard it is to add some form of notice.

They are unable to post and have to email me their comments instead. Have you been able to figure out what is up from the backend of CUNY Academic Commons? Thanks so much for your help on this!

Today, we've disabled the Akismet comment spam plugin for logged-in users, so if the affected students have Commons user accounts, tell them to login to the Commons and they should be able to post their comments without problems. Please let us know if the site continues to have problems.

If these users do not have Commons accounts, then the spam problem will still occur. To help, I've also activated the "Akismet Spam Notifications" plugin on https://cstspring2020.commons.gc.cuny.edu/, so the instructor should get emails whenever a comment is marked as spam. The instructor should mark legitimate comments as "not spam" to train Akismet about these false positives here:
https://cstspring2020.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=spam

Closing on the basis of the above. Thanks, Ray.