Comment Spam
Apparently LJ introduced a new comment spam feature, default-on, for all communities and journals. ( Official announcement.)
In short: any comment containing a link that is not to a pre-whitelisted domain gets treated as a potential spam comment. (In practice, this appears to be most off-site links.) The comment with the link is screened from everyone except the journal/community owners/maintainers. (No, not even the original poster will know it's there.) No notifications are sent out; no central queue exists for processing these comments. It seems that the only way to know a potential spam comment exists is for a maintainer to open up a post and read the comments.
I am as annoyed by comment spam as anyone, but this strikes me as an unusable tool. For the moment, I'm turning it off. If you believe one of your comments to someone might have gone astray due to a non-whitelisted link, gimme a link to the post, and I'll go see if I can free it.
I trust that if you've been getting comment spam on your old posts you've been deleting them as the notifications come in. However, I'm unsure what to do about comment spam on unmonitored posts: deleted or abandoned journals, say. Right now, anonymous comments are screened by default throughout the community, but given that most LJ spammers seem to be using throwaway accounts, that's probably not a big help.
One option is to screen comments from non-members: membership to the comm is unmoderated, but as near as I can tell, spammers aren't signing up to be members before they leave their comments. If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
In short: any comment containing a link that is not to a pre-whitelisted domain gets treated as a potential spam comment. (In practice, this appears to be most off-site links.) The comment with the link is screened from everyone except the journal/community owners/maintainers. (No, not even the original poster will know it's there.) No notifications are sent out; no central queue exists for processing these comments. It seems that the only way to know a potential spam comment exists is for a maintainer to open up a post and read the comments.
I am as annoyed by comment spam as anyone, but this strikes me as an unusable tool. For the moment, I'm turning it off. If you believe one of your comments to someone might have gone astray due to a non-whitelisted link, gimme a link to the post, and I'll go see if I can free it.
I trust that if you've been getting comment spam on your old posts you've been deleting them as the notifications come in. However, I'm unsure what to do about comment spam on unmonitored posts: deleted or abandoned journals, say. Right now, anonymous comments are screened by default throughout the community, but given that most LJ spammers seem to be using throwaway accounts, that's probably not a big help.
One option is to screen comments from non-members: membership to the comm is unmoderated, but as near as I can tell, spammers aren't signing up to be members before they leave their comments. If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.