Are YOUR Comments Banned by Akismet? Image credit Hurricane Softwares
URGENT: Please DO NOT leave comments in unrelated blog posts in this and especially in OTHER blogs about the Akismet issue.
Leaving comments in the blogs of those who have commented that they flag non-spam as spam solves nothing and brings you down to their level.
If you wish to respond to them please do it IN THIS POST or on your own blog.
If you identify yourself in your comments it reflects badly on you and there is a very real possibility that they will flag you as a spammer!
Leaving comments in their blogs using fake information is a waste of your time. It will only make them feel they are correct in what they are doing and they will simply delete the posts.
If they do not understand now nothing more we can say or do is likely to make any difference at all.
NEW: I have created two test pages anyone can use to test their names and URLs. See Akismet Test Pages.
UPDATE: June 7 Akismet has removed the ability to use the test page mentioned in this post to determine if your comments are being sent to either SPAM or being deleted outright by Akismet.
MESSAGE TO AKISMET: How does removing our ability to find out if our names or URLs are blocked by your plugin improve this situation? That makes this worse – not better – and makes you look guilty. You should be willing to TELL US that your plugin does indeed delete comments. If that is how you believe it SHOULD work honesty is the best policy.
If you love commenting in blogs you are in for a shock. Did you know that Akismet is censoring comments?
Yes, there are still plenty of really spammy comments showing up in our spam folder so it LOOKS like we get to moderate them.
When I have tested in the past because Dr. Ann Voisin of Linda Cristas College I always found comments from their students about Toys Period in my SPAM folder and was able to rescue them.
I owe Dr. Ann and her students an apology. They were correct.
Akismet IS censoring their comments
And mine – and probably yours too!
Yesterday and today I saw with my own eyes that comments I wrote and left in blogs I moderate were simply vanishing into thin air. I waited 48 hours just to make sure they weren’t just delayed. They were not.
My very real comments went straight into the bit bucket!
In Are You Banned By Akismet For Spamming? Ashish wrote:
Akismet system relies heavily upon blog owners marking your comments/trackbacks as spam and reporting them back to Akismet as such via the WordPress plugin. This means that many innocent bloggers are “false positives” in the Akismet system due to either malicious or ignorant behavior on the part of other bloggers.
What we need to realize is that many bloggers have a VERY BROAD definition of spam and if they report you as a spammer you could be banned even if you have never left a spam comment in your life and don’t even know what a keyword is!
Here are some unusual definitions of spam that I have come across:
- Any comment that has a business in the URL field.
- Any comment left by anyone the blogger doesn’t recognize.
- Comments that include a link not related to their blog’s niche.
- Any comment that has keywords in the name field EVEN IN BLOGS THAT HAVE KEYWORDLUV installed.
- Any comment they don’t like.
- Any comment from a commentator they don’t like.
- Any trackback = spam to some bloggers because so many of them are from scraped or MFA (made for AdSense sites) – even high quality incoming links from major sites and blogs!
I hope any blogger reading this will reconsider what they are labeling spam. These all fit my definition of spam which I hope you’ll adopt. These really ARE SPAM:
- Comments that have nothing to do with your post including generic “one size fits all” comments.
- Comments that are lists of words or links to junk sites of any kind.
- Objectionable or profane comments and comments that link to adult or illegal sites.
- Any comment that is an advertisement for a business or another site even if it IS related to your blog.
- Copied text or comment spam.
- Comments that are obviously intended only as a way to slide in a link and mention of another site.
- Ridiculous suggestions to “keep posting”, requests for help subscribing, over-the-top flattery, insults (do they really think THAT would work?), “I just found you in a search engine” and short comments that add nothing to the conversation like “great post” or +1 or me too.
I want to encourage bloggers and especially CommentLuv bloggers to welcome QUALITY comments from business owners, entrepreneurs and bloggers. Please read my tips in that post on best practices for both bloggers and commentators.
UPDATE: Akismet has removed the ability to use that page to test to see if your comments are being sent to either SPAM or being deleted outright by Akismet.
I discussed this issue today Andy Bailey from CommentLuv and he sent me this:
Akismet Test link. By submitting a comment there you can determine whether it is being automatically deleted by Akismet or not.
This is NOT as simple as most might think. You might be ok when you enter your name one way but not another. Your comments might go through if you enter your URL some ways and not others. If you ever comment in KeywordLuv blogs any comment with @ one keyword might work while another with @ something else won’t.
Even if you test every combination you ever use in the name and URL fields Akismet might cause your comment to disappear based on any word in the comment itself.
Unless you test every comment you ever leave you will never really know if the blogger ever sees it until it appears live (or likely doesn’t)!
The bottom line for me is that this is totally unacceptable. I would rather have to pre-moderate every comment than have real commentators censored in a way that I never even see their comments.
Unless we start Tweeting to each other every time we leave a comment or send an email or use the contact form to ensure the blogger knows to look for our comments, an ever increasing number of comments will simply vanish.
We have these choices:
- Ask Akismet to clarify precisely how their plugin works and consider modifying this behavior.
- If Akismet will not change how their plugin works for everyone, at least let us opt out of this behavior so that we see every comment to moderate it.
- I was going to say that if they will not let us opt out they should at least NOTIFY US every time any information we use when commenting is banned but I can already predict they would not be willing to do that because then real spammers will simply change what they use.
- Find an alternative spam management plugin.
- Disable Akismet and switch to pre-moderating comments BEFORE they appear. If we just disable it our blogs will be flooded with objectionable real spam and we can not have that.
I call on all bloggers to make your feelings about this known to Akismet. You can try tweeting to them but they are not highly interactive on Twitter. A better way would be to use their contact form. Be specific about what you would like them to do.
If you know of an alternative plugin please let me know.
I am already not a big fan of WP-SpamFree because they block many words automatically including business and marketing and in many blogs if you trigger their spam filter you lose your comment. (In others you don’t and I do not know why. Perhaps someone will share that with us.)
If I do not hear back from Akismet and do not find an alternative I will disable Akismet and set this and all my blogs to pre-moderate all comments.
I hate to do that for two reasons:
- It makes it more difficult for commentators to use my Comment Share strategy. In blogs where comments are moderated I recommend saving the links where you leave comments and coming back later to see if they are visible. I use Tomboy Notes for that but others use spreadsheets.
- I dread finding out how many more comments are disappearing into the Akismet ether. I already review 150+ spam comments daily and rescue several real comments each time I check them.
Have any other recommendations? Please leave a comment. Not sure this applies to you? I urge you to go check to see if you are banned by Akismet. Do other bloggers a favor and leave a comment in this post either way so we can get an idea how many are being affected.
Here are the two comments I have left in the Akismet test blog post in case anyone reading this would like more details:
I have proven to my satisfaction that Akismet is deleting valid comments we as bloggers never see. If you get taken to a blank white page when you comment that comment probably got deleted.
If you sometimes use your full name and other times your first name one can be blocked and not the other. The same is true if you use your first name and your blog name as I often do. In non-KeywordLuv blogs I often put Gail from GrowMap so the blogger will recognize me as I am best known across the Internet as GrowMap but many prefer a first name.
If you comment in KeywordLuv enabled blogs you might have name @ keywords so you might be blocked using some keywords but not others. It is also possible that even if you come here and verify that the name, email and website you intend to use when commenting is ok but some word in your comment causes it to be blocked.
Akismet might treat http://YourDomain.com differently than http://www.YourDomain.com differently than http://YourDomain.com/ and individual PAGES on your site that you have left in the Website field might be blocked.
If you are going to be commenting you almost have to come here and test your entire comment first if you really want it to show up OR you could leave the comment and if it doesn’t show up immediately THEN come here and test.
I am not willing to let Akismet delete comments I never see. That is dangerous and censorship and it just won’t do. Why can obvious spam end up in my spam section but not all the real comments? Why are THEY singled out?
Either Akismet needs to change this or at least let us opt out of it OR we need an alternative that does not censor our commentators OR we will have to go to pre-moderation and moderate every comment.
Testing to see if GrowMap @ Support Small Businesses is blocked. It is. Then I tested to see if having that post in the Website was blocked. It is. Now I’m testing just using Gail and my home page works and have the link in the body of the comment. That doesn’t work either.
Any comment that includes a link to the post on my site about the importance of supporting small businesses is automatically censored by the Akismet plugin.
In case anyone wonders why I want bloggers to support small businesses it is because they are the solution to the economic crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere.Bloggers can choose to be a big part of the solution or they can delete (or let Akismet censor) quality comments from small local and online businesses and let our economies collapse because we are too blind to see where we are headed. You can find a link to that post on my best-of-growmap page and in the comment replies on most posts.
If you want to see what the Akismet test page looked like it is currently still in cache in the search engine and I will add before and after screen captures below:
Screen capture of what was on the page when I wrote this post:
What was at that URL when I tested and wrote this post - click to see Cache version while it works
Date and Time of Cache Version shown in the screen capture above
Screen capture of my comment live on that past when I wrote this post: (Only what would fit on one screen is shown below. The full comment is shown above.)
Cache version screen capture of my Comment Live on the Akismet test page
Screen capture of what is on that page since this post was published (click image to go there):
After this post went live the ability to test to see what Akismet blocks was removed; click image to go to that page now.
I can now see part of the two comments I left last night in Cache showing “Your comment is awaiting moderation“. Only one of them appears in the cache version for some reason.
Here is what I see when I go to that page now:
Comments that were live on that site last night are now "awaiting moderation".
{ 304 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
Your comment reveals why this is going to be such a serious problem. Akismet isn’t a person – it is an algorithm that is only as accurate as the bloggers clicking the spam button.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Yes, this is much of the problem – that most are far too quick to flag real comments as spam. Even those who would not do that intentionally ARE doing it accidentally. Is can be extremely difficult to determine whether a particular comment is or is not spam and growing more challenging by the day as the spammers get more cunning.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Freelancers- How to Get More Freelance Work =-.
Twitter: @whoistodd
[blockquote]It can be extremely difficult to determine whether a particular comment is or is not spam and growing more challenging by the day as the spammers get more cunning[/blockquote]
Hi Gail,
Now that it’s a week later, hopefully we can bury the hatchet, so to speak. I think the quote above is a much more “charitable” reasoning for why some of us do occasionally mark comments as spam … as opposed to assuming that we do it out of some sort of vindictiveness, or meanness of spirit. I would never intentionally hurt someone else. But as you pointed out above, in the case of “spam”, in many cases it’s a judgment call … and it’s not always an easy one.
I actually think that making my comment links “dofollow” adds an additional level of responsibility to comment moderation. Because those links are originating from my blog, I’m effectively “endorsing” the content on the destination site (at least in the eyes of Google).
Given that, doesn’t it make sense that I might want to be a bit judicious about which sites I choose to endorse through a dofollow link?
I will concede that bloggers do have some responsibility to try to be fair when it comes to whether or not to flag a comment in Akismet (since it can have repercussions beyond just that blog).
However, can we also agree that commentators should probably bare a bit of responsibility too … by Not forcing blog owners into making those difficult calls about whether something is a legit comments, or spam?
Todd
.-= Todd´s featured blog ..How to keep a Toddler Quiet for Hours =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Welcome Todd,
IMHO, bloggers absolutely should moderate their own blogs according to their own ethical standards. I regularly unlink URLs that are bad neighborhoods and just now I even edited out the name because it was the name of a site that is illegal.
Yes, commentators and especially those who are writing comments for businesses must learn to write them in a way that it is more obvious they are NOT spammers. That would really help.
Many real people who don’t use business URLs or keywords leave very weak comments that do sound like spam. They don’t know any better so we, as wise bloggers, must first give them the benefit of the doubt and then guide them in how to improve.
When in doubt, delete works just great. The bloggers who understand the ramifications of flagging something as spam use delete a lot and reserve flagging something as spam that they really KNOW is spam – and in many cases we simply can not know for sure.
Bloggers are never going to agree on what they will allow in their blog. Andy Bailey of CommentLuv and I have been brainstorming ideas for letting bloggers decide what kind of readers and commentators they would like to see.
I have suggested that some blogs like this one be allowed to “opt-in” as keyword-friendly, business-friendly sites so that others like us can interact with each other and hobby blogs and those blogs who prefer not to have those kinds of commentators would be known to us.
Where we will most likely need to agree to disagree is on whether to allow comments from businesses seeking links and commentators whose native language is not English. Because I have studied other languages I know how difficult it is to write clearly in a non-native language.
My decisions and actions are guided by what is best for all which I know is not the norm. Most are guided by what is best for THEM only or by what the false G wants.
I choose my freedom and encourage only those few others who are of like mind to do the same. My Support Small Businesses post explains why I feel the way I do about how links and comments are important to improving our economy before it is too late.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Support Small Businesses =-.
Twitter: @laforge129
Gail,
IMHO we also must also consider the repercussions of those more powerful Bloggers. I quote:
With great Power, there must also come great responsibility!!
Like we already discussed if there was a blogger who was highly ranked and wanted to lash out at another blog owner by marking their comment as spam would greatly make it just that much harder to mark his blog as unspam because other less powerful sites would have to work double hard to undue the problem that created the problem in the first place. I can see this being a problem in the long run!! Anyone else want to suggest other ways to prevent this??
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..Facebook starts the long spiral downward- =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Paul,
It is a simple thing for me to easily see who is selfless and can be totally trusted and who is selfish and is likely to be vindictive. Obviously I would only give that power to those who would not abuse it.
How easy it is for others to tell who can be trusted and who can not I do not know.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs =-.
Twitter: @lavenderuses
Gail you are so generous with how you see spam and the fact that you moderate your comments section. I am glad to have found this and other dofollow sites that teach me the ethical way to sort this out.
I have Akismet on my new blog (new to blogging so heaps to learn) as it was what my blogging coaches recommended. I only get a few comments each post at the moment and so reading everything that comes in whether spam or not isn’t a real problem yet.
When my blog first went up I got about 44 spams (they were spams as I checked every one) that had rightly been blocked by Akismet. Now I only get 1 very rarely and so far they have not put any in the spam folder that wasn’t spam.
Maybe I am going to find out about this issue when my readership and commenters increase.
I would like advice on what to use instead so I am ready for when my blog grows to heaps of comments daily.
Thanks for the articles as they are teaching me about stuff that I wouldn’t know till it happens. Better to be informed now so when it gets busier I’ve got things in place to deal with all eventualities eh?!
Patricia Perth Australia
http://www.lavenderuses.com
I think this pluggin is good, but many a times it has also tagged spam to some of my fans comments which were original. So ultimately you have to check it manually and better not to rely completely on Automatic solutions
Twitter: @GrowMap
We have stopped using Akismet because it does not advise real commentators of the status of their comment when they have been flagged as spammers.
Even worse, it deletes comments instantly that bloggers never see if they have a particular box checked – a setting with misleading wording that 3 out of 4 experience bloggers misunderstood. There is no telling how many bloggers are deleting their best comments that have no idea how that works.
Test your own name and URL (link provided at the very top of this post) and find out if Akismet thinks YOU are a spammer. Many will be very surprised.
As for Akismet resolving this issue for us, that is highly unlikely. They have little motivation to change and as you can see by the comments in this post and at the sentiments of many of the bloggers who have commented in this Don’t Be “THAT GUY” post I am sad to say:
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place =-.
Twitter: @KathyBlogger
I think a lot of legit blog commentators get flagged as spammers because they occasionally engage in borderline spam tactics. I think the secret is to always try to error on the side of caution. Unless the blog specifically advertises that they allow keywords in the name field, you are taking a big risk by trying to use them.
In defense of those who are tough against spamming, a lot of us do not engage in borderline or blatant spam techniques. Therefore we are extremely impatient when someone visits and leaves a one line comment telling us how great we are. There is a 1% chance that the comment is legit. There is a 99% chance it is a spam comment.
People just need to realize that you need to give a little to get a little. Leave a thoughtful on-topic comment that shows you have actually read the post. It isn’t really that hard. If you absolutely must have a keyword anchored link, make sure you are only doing it from places that say they allow it.
.-= Kathy´s featured blog ..Should You Use No Follow Tags For Comments On Your Blog =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Kathy,
Although that is a nice sentiment, it won’t work because many of the most active bloggeres who DO leave very high quality comments are already flagged as spammers. What a wise blogger considers spam and what many others consider spam are a long way apart.
Many others have been flagged as spammers because they don’t have any experience with spam yet (because their blogs are too new) so they leave comments that LOOK like spam but aren’t. I know this because I often recognize new commentators by their Twitter IDs.
Sometimes new readers sincerely do just want to say “nice post” or are not deep thinkers with any major ideas to share.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Find Out If Akismet Has YOU Flagged as a Spammer =-.
Twitter: @http://www.doxmarketing.com
The best way is not to install stuffs like this in blogs and manually moderate comments. That’s good.
.-= Tony@web design´s featured blog ..Can social media be profitable Part 1- Blogs =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Yes Tony, we are going to have to manually moderate our blogs at least until we find a spam filter that doesn’t filter out our best comments.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Freelancers- How to Get More Freelance Work =-.
Twitter: @intenseblog
Oh I hate the way that Akismet works, my website was banned for non reason of mine
, maybe another person can attack your website via this way
.-= Jennifer R´s featured blog ..50 jQuery Plugins for Validation- Uploading- Date Pickers- Auto-Suggest and Password Security =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Jennifer,
Many bloggers do not understand what real comment spam is:
Some businesses and especially the “SEO” or linkbuilding workers they hire are manually writing spam comments that are not properly written. My post about the Benefits of CommentLuv has some guidelines I hope everyone (both bloggers and commentators) will read.
This has caused some bloggers to associate ALL comments that mention ANYTHING – no matter how relevant to the post where they are left – in a comment that includes keywords or a link to a business URL to what is real spam.
They are flagging real commentators as spammers right and left and getting many of the readers who support and share what they write banned from all WordPress blogs.
Many cases of people being banned are caused by those who do not clearly understand the implications of their clicking spam instead of delete. If a blogger does not like a comment that is NOT SPAM they need to use delete instead of reporting that person.
It is also true that if someone does not like you or is an unethical competitor or simply chooses to be vindictive that they can have you banned repeatedly and even if you have many friends flagging your comments as not-spam that will not help.
You will have to ask Akismet to unban you over and over or persuade your favorite blogs where you comment to stop using Akismet. We are testing alternate methods of dealing with spam and will share what works best asap.
Note that many who would delete or flag our comments as spam WILL continue to comment in our blogs. I’m sure they would scream if we did the same to them but since we don’t, it may not be very easy to determine who they are.
One way would be to save the URLs of all comments you leave and see which ones get deleted or never appear.
They are also the bloggers most likely to be flagging your comments as spam. The more you can avoid that happening the better. Even if we all stop using Akisment many others will not and you don’t want to be flagged as a spammer if you can help it.
I see you have created a Link Love plugin similar to the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin.
These types of plugins do nothing to keep spammers from flooding your blog with spammy comments because most of them never check to see if you’re giving them a link or deleting their comment or reporting them as spammers. I keep asking and no one has yet been able to explain why they believe that type of plugin is benefiting them.
If they are link builders and notice some comments are dofollow and others nofollow don’t you think they’re smart enough to write enough comments to get them to go dofollow?
We are testing captchas to determine which is easy for commentators to use while keeping the most automated spam from going live in our blogs. I will share that when we make a decision.
I keep asking and am still waiting for someone to tell me how exactly Lucia’s Linky Love and similar plugins are benefiting them.
Bloggers write about, read, and link to bloggers who want to interact with them – and that is as it should be. Wise bloggers interact with others of like mind.
Bloggers who are DoFollowing ALL valuable comments would do well to move in separate circles from those who NoFollow their comments.
Bloggers who NoFollow links in the bodies of their blog posts or do not link to you at all when they write about or quote you are not worthy of your time. Cut them out of your circle (unless you are one of them. If you are, create you own circles but if none of you are willing to link to the others you won’t see much benefit).
.-= Gail @ Support Bloggers´s featured blog ..DoFollow CommentLuv KeywordLuv Community =-.
Akismet is actually lovely. For the past years, it helped me a lot getting rid of the spammers comments most of the time
But sometimes i just get mails from my friends, they indicate that their comment wasn’t spam at all but it just got blocked by Akismet anyway.
I think if you got the time, Moderate comments manually. Akismet is lovely really, but i don’t know what’s inside it’s head
Twitter: @GrowMap
I have to disagree with you here John.
The friends who are letting you know are the minority. For every person who tells you there will be 10-99 who do not tell you. They simply stop coming around.
Where are you from, John? Istanbul? I do not recognize the language on your Web site. We are looking for people with excellent English skills who live in other countries to assist us with all the work we have to do.
If you know anyone who might be interested please ask them to contact me through this blog or on Twitter.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Freelancers- How to Get More Freelance Work =-.
Poor choice of words mate I concur. Let me rephrase that: By Lovely, i mean it WAS lovely when i heard it for the first time; Some magical thingy that will supposedly keep spammers away from your blog. But after a while just like you said, it is really not lovely when people can’t comment on your website. It’s literally stupid to turn people away when they’re actually trying to add something to the discussion.
Oh and yeah I am from Turkey and i think i have better-than-average english skills. I’ll ask my employees if they know anyone. But it’s very unlikely. In here, you can’t find many people who actually speak english at all let alone speaking it properly. But maybe i can help you
I have a fairly untouched twitter account. I’ll give you a buzz 
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello John,
Thank you so much for coming back and clarifying what you meant. Since filtering spam out with computers is not working very well, one of the tasks I would like to find people interested in working to do is manually deleting the most obvious spam from blogs.
For that task a person would not have to write English well – they would only have to be able to tell the difference between comments full of links or that are advertisements and real comments. They wouldn’t even have to be really good at it as anything gray they could just leave for the blogger to moderate themselves.
Do let me know if you come across anyone who may be interested. You might also want to join us in the BloggerLuv blogging community or in our private blog collaboration. We share skills and collaborate with each other in both. I can email you details if you like.
.-= Gail @ Abundance for All´s featured blog ..Akismet Configuration- How to Turn Off Akismet Automatic Comment Deletion =-.
Sure Gail i’ll ask around if someone could do that
But i gotta say, not many people in this country are really into blogging :/ I’ll let you know if i find an enthusiastic anti-spam guy! 
Btw i’ve been hearing about the BloggerLuv community. I’ll give a detailed look into it
PS: I have good eyes and a perfect sight, yet your captcha’s are driving me crazy!
Twitter: @laforge129
I tried to add to discussion about Amazon being down and I wonder if they are using akismet or someone who is reporting bad comments without them knowing. I know my comment was relevant to the discussion!
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..Amazon Get’s the Fail Whale- Major Loss to Affiliates =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Paul,
In many sites – and the larger they are the more delete happy they tend to be – being relevant may not be enough. Often they are just very reluctant to let others have their say.
On sites like that I put my comments in my FriendFeed account and link them to their post. That way I have my say anyway and if they delete my comments or don’t approve them oh well.
When I saw your comment Amazon was still down. It seems to be ok now but when did used books get so expensive? Many are almost the same price as new!
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Word of Mouth Marketing =-.
Twitter: @laforge129
Most people who try to sell used stuff on their don’t send the stuff for free and if they do they justify it by marking up the price of the book!! I only by new on Amazon unless I find it cheaper on Amazon. That way I know I am getting the best deal!
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..Computer Geek on Duty Sign – Wall Plaque Male Edition – Programming Mainframe =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Paul,
As wise consumers we all need to better understand that no matter what you sell you have to build both some kind of profit and shipping costs into the price. Hobby sellers (anyone who doesn’t need profit to stay in business) skew our perceptions of what the prices should be!
The cost of shipping is the number one complaint of online buyers. Realizing that (thanks to many Market Research surveys on the subject), ecommerce stores offer “FREE” shipping whenever they can BUT there really is no such thing as “Free shipping” because if they want to stay in business they have to put that cost into the product price.
I blame infomercials for the unwillingness of buyers to pay reasonable costs for shipping. Many of them sell products at cost to get the call and then hide their markup in the “shipping and handling”.
In every purchase from a business that intends to stay in business, ALL of these must be factored into the final price:
1) Cost of product
2) Overhead of the business including real estate, taxes, utilities, employees (pay, benefits, retirement, Social Security tax, unemployment tax)
3) Advertising
4) Shipping costs
If more consumers understood business Cost of Sales we would not complain about what MUST be involved in our purchases.
l.
They are better for the economy because the money we spend with them is in turn spent with other businesses and their suppliers – and they do not squeeze their suppliers so hard that THEY have trouble staying in business.
This widespread lack of understanding of basic business concepts is what allowed Wal-Mart and Big Box Stores to destroy the economies of so many towns and cities and now our entire country (and other countries as well).
My latest post about Open Source Alternatives clearly shows what is wrong with our economy and includes a link to the best TRUE history of the United States and what we can do to survive the major depression that we are ALREADY IN. (If we were not so removed from what is really happening we would all know that!)
Here are two excellent resources for understanding Cost of Sales that people who wish to stay in business can use to set REASONABLE profits and determine what to charge:
Understanding CCOS: “What is the Right Cost of Sales for My Company?”
Setting Cost of Sales for Service Businesses
When business owners get desperate – as they will be soon if they are not already because of how seriously our economy has already been damaged – their first instinct is to cut prices.
There are already fewer buyers so sales MUST go down. To then compound that problem by reducing the profit on each sale creates a death spiral that WILL put them out of business.
Businesses that make this mistake WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS and while they are in the process of their inevitable failure their unsustainably low prices damage every other business that offers what they are selling at prices that are too low to sustain!
Consumers MUST be willing to pay a reasonable price for everything we buy or not buy at all. If we are to survive what will be a crash as bad or worse than The Great Depression we simply must stop being panicked sheep and start using the brains God gave us.
.-= Gail @ Support Small Businesses´s featured blog ..We Need INDEPENDENT Open Source Alternatives =-.
Twitter: @divorcementor
I have just been sent the link to this page from another blogger who has helped me so much today. I am reasonably new at blogging and have just discovered that I have spent the last couple of weeks commenting on blogs and totally wasting my time because I have been banned.
I don’t know why and was not told why.
I find this confusing enough without having some big brother making decisions or some blogger who I am actually taking time to join their discussion make decisions about me.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello Nicola,
The simple explanation is that because real spammers have stolen so much of our time, bloggers have turned to tools like Akismet to block what they’re doing. Real comments are what some would call “collateral damage” (others affected by the process).
You have not totally wasted your time commenting because some bloggers do check their spam filters and will rescue and approve your comments.
Whenever you see a white screen your comment was instantly deleted by Akismet. Any other time the comment is in the blogger’s spam folder and could be approved later.
You need to request that Akismet unban you using this link to contact Akismet.
Then you need to understand that many bloggers will simply flag even well-intentioned comments as spam – even if your comment is specifically about their posts. See the poll I published to see what I mean.
Eventually there will be more bloggers who understand the importance of links for small businesses and even their own blogs and this will not be as big an issue. Until then we can only do what we can.
I will be compiling lists of bloggers who welcome businesses and either do not use Akismet OR at least rescue comments from the spam section. There are many demands on my time so getting all that done is a challenge.
There are some great tips for both businesses and bloggers in my post about effectively using CommentLuv. Be sure to read the part about using CommentLuv Anchor Text Links.
.-= Gail @ Support Small Businesses´s featured blog ..TwtPoll- SPAM or NOT SPAM – YOU Decide =-.
I officially hate Akismet as of now.
Please guide me:
I tried to comment on a number of blogs today (all of which had akismet installed) after 7 PM (when my modem rebooted and got a new IP address), and the comments just didn’t appear (Before this reboot, my comments were appearing.)
When I presses the ’submit’ button, it would just load the page, and my comment would no where be seen, meaning akismet thought my comment was spam (as I am sure it went to the spam folder, thanks to akismet).
It seems like I got a ‘BAD IP ADDRESS’. Why am I being penalized if someone else spammed? I know this because before my comments were appearing, but when the modem rebooted and got a new IP ADDRESS, my comments were not appearing, they were going to spam folder thanks to AKISMET (WHICH I HATE).
How do I know this all for sure?
I then used a PROXY server, and then commented on those blogs AGAIN, and VOILA. They were being accepted.
So right now it seems I have a so called ‘BAD IP ADDRESS’ as conceived by AKISMET. I will have to reboot my modem TILL I get an IP address which is not blacklisted, even though I DID NOT spam. It was none of my fault. I am being penalized for someones else doing spam (Though I even DOUBT THIS TOO). Their algorithm sucks.
Am I being penalized for getting an IP through which someone spammed or is it a bug or is it a fault of AKISMET?
Please help and guide me.
Thanks,
Nabeel
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello Nabeel,
You have run into a situation that is definitely not widely understood even by people who build tools. Apparently they don’t see the danger in banning IP addresses from ISPs that dynamically assign them.
Let me explain. While some Internet connections have what is called a static IP (static = unchanging = assigned to that one person) many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) randomly give the next person who connects through them the next available IP address. When you disconnect someone else gets the IP address you were using.
Allowing anyone to ban by IP address is simply stupid unless they first verify that it is indeed an unchanging static IP and not one that was dynamically assigned.
To further complicate that issue, spammers can spoof IP addresses so the person actually being blocked is totally innocent and you did nothing to keep the spammers away.
This same issue is why email is NOT a reliable communication method unless you NEVER ASSUME that an email has been received until it has been acknowledged.
These posts are useful to better understanding the problem of blocking spammers without blocking everyone else:
Attacking Spam Methods is Useless
Why YOUR ISP blocks email you are expecting.
Spam and Filters: Improving Deliverability of Your Email Newsletters and Alerts
Yes, Nabeel, you and anyone else who ends up with that IP address could be being unfairly penalized because someone else was flagged as a spammer. YOU might actually be the one who triggered the flag though because as you can see by reading this post and comments or looking at the survey I did that many bloggers consider real comments spam.
.-= Gail @ Support Bloggers´s featured blog ..TwtPoll- SPAM or NOT SPAM – YOU Decide =-.
Also, how does Akismet actually work?
Is it banning on IP basis? Why is it blacklisting/banning/blocking IP Addresses instead of banning and blocking spam COMMENTS?? What is someone receives this IP address and he/she wants to post a genuine comment? What’s their fault? Why can’t they ban spam comments instead of taking the easy way out and banning entire IP Addresses? Doesn’t Akismet know that someone else could receive that IP address?
Please reply to both of my comments.
Nabeel
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello Nabeel,
Akismet and WordPress have multiple methods of blocking spam including blacklisting specific words or IP addresses, flagging the URL or the name or the IP address.
Yes, Akismet SHOULD KNOW that many IP addresses are still dynamically assigned; however, that is assuming that they care whether innocent commentators are being blocked or not.
If you read the comments in this post and others like it you will see that many people absolutely do not care how their actions affect others as long as they get what they want. Many are so sick of spam that filtering it out is far more important to them than whether innocent people are also affected or not.
This may change soon because many who post that Akismet never did anything to them or that Akismet works great are already flagged as spammers themselves and just don’t know it yet. The fastest way to change someone’s opinion is to have it affect them personally.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..How to Build a Successful Blog Based Business =-.
Twitter: @blondishnet
I will probably refer to your blog entry at WPAddict.net… mostly because I do think it is something that needs to be addressed directly to the WordPress community. I have not had this problem as of yet for myself, but it is something I really wonder if it is because of spammers and the IP and you might not be specifically targeted. It might be your IP happened to be quite close or perhaps the same as the reported offender.
Believe me, I have had contact with webhost and ISP alike about spam… and a lot of it usually deals with IP more so than the email address itself (which is one of the basic factors in pinpointing spammers.)
For me, I am not sure if this should be considered anymore in the Askimet algorithm. Dynamic IP addresses from broadband really can make things difficult for the rest of us trying to surf without being told … “Hey, you are a spammer.” and you saying “WTF!?!”
.-= Nile´s featured blog ..Facebook- Google… Who Else is Competing in the Game of Monopoly =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Nile,
It amazes me that people are still blocking IP addresses when most Internet users probably still do not have static (permanent, unchanging) IP addresses.
Both dial-up and broadband Internet access uses dynamic IP addresses meaning you get a new IP address each time you connect. ISPS (Internet Service Providers) do try to keep their users from spamming but they have to identify the spammers before they can kick them off and by then the IP they used or even the entire server can already be flagged.
The reason almost everyone uses AWeber is because they work so hard to keep their email servers whitelisted and your email delivered. It is probably a full time job for at least one person and maybe more.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..We Need INDEPENDENT Open Source Alternatives =-.
Testing akismet spam.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello Ace,
You have to go to the other sites linked at the top of this post to test. Akismet is disabled in this blog.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Akismet Configuration- How to Turn Off Akismet Automatic Comment Deletion =-.
Twitter: @laforge129
Gail,
This new Captcha system is liable to hurt your commenters. If anything see if you can’t regulate who has to use the captcha system. Although I am using Recaptcha that is much nicer to the eyes and easier to read, you have to consider the ramifications of use something like this. It is after all you blog but I would suggest Recaptcha because of how easy it is for the blind.
Oh and if your worried about spam, with recaptcha, I haven’t seen a significant increase in it. Actually I have seen a drop in spam and an increase in comments!!
Just saying!!
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..5 most viewed for Unlocked Phones in the past 30 days =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Paul,
The bots are really slamming this blog so we have been researching ways to at least block those hundreds I get every day without impacting real commentators. Ron had the captcha set to high difficulty. I just changed it to medium and would appreciate your input on whether it is better or still a bad idea.
Set to medium and on my PC and monitor this captcha is much easier for me to read than the one on your blog. I suspect that varies by monitor, maybe PC and the eyesight of the viewer.
I do not know if I have any visually impaired readers and hate to make it harder for them to comment. My spam jumped from ~400 a day to 800+ so I’m testing solutions. Captcha may be a bad idea.
The best idea I have to date is to find someone in a country where the dollar goes a long way or a blogger who would like one-on-one collaboration with me who can manually delete the obvious spam for me. I am so swamped and the spam is overwhelming.
Although this blog gets hit the heaviest I manage many more blogs and there simply are not enough hours in the day.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Find Out If Akismet Has YOU Flagged as a Spammer =-.
Twitter: @laforge129
Maybe I can help you fix some of the problems you are having. I get an average of 1000 people on my site on any given day. I have found some good Anti-spam techniques to prevent bots from gaining a foothold. I will be more than glad to do a blog post discussing this very thing because many people would benefit from this. I just know that on any given week, I am only get 5 to 10 spam messages in my spam folder and the rest are waiting my moderation, which are usually legitimate users and IP’S. If you would like me to do a blog post about how to remove unwanted spam I will be more than glad to do it!!
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..How Toolbars can help your business and income!! =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Paul,
Thank you for writing that post. I am reviewing it at StumbleUpon and sharing it elsewhere online right now.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Akismet Configuration- How to Turn Off Akismet Automatic Comment Deletion =-.
Twitter: @laforge129
I have created a post about tricks and tips about which programs and tools that I use to combat spam!! Check it out and let me know what you think!!
Five ways to reduce spam in your Comments — From my perspective
.-= Paul Sylvester´s featured blog ..Companies Just don’t Get it about Spam! =-.
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thank you Paul,
We’ve been testing a captcha but many people don’t like them so we are still researching. I’ll share the post you wrote and the results of the poll I’m running about the captcha we’re testing with others in hopes we can find the best available solution.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..TWTPoll- SI Captcha Anti-Spam WP Plugin =-.
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