New LJ "Spam protection" -- turn it OFF if you maintain a community

[ron_newman]

Sometime earlier this month, LiveJournal introduced a "Spam Protection" feature which screens comments made to any community or personal journal. LJ turned this on by default for all communities without any notice to community maintainers. LJ belatedly and incompletely described the new feature in this news announcement, several days or weeks

Comments

[surrey_sucks]

So.... if someone leaves a comment in your journal (or a post in a community), and there is a link in the comment (which is not unreasonable), then, the comment is screened, and the person who made the post (the post, not the comment) has absolutely no idea a comment was left?

And where is this mystery "spam" page? And who decides which websites are whitelisted?

Did I get the gist of this?

[ron_newman]

Yes, what you said is definitely true if the comment is made in a community. I've heard that notification does occur if the comment is made to a personal journal, but I haven't been able to verify this.

The mystery "spam" page is accessed from a link that reads "(Read N suspcious comments)" on the comments page. In a community, this link is visible only to the community maintainers and not to the person who made the post.

I have no idea how the whitelist is maintained or where to find it.

See http://davis-meta.livejournal.com/37404.html for an example of the confusion this "feature" caused in davis_square, a community that I co-maintain.

[glowing_dragon]

Ooh, thanks for that!

[sewcute]

uh. . .livejournal. . .what?!

::drops jaw::

I wouldn't mind it so much if someone was notified about the comments, it's the NON notification and the mysterious white list that bothers me.

[fiddlingfrog]

Sometime earlier this month
Earlier being last Thursday, the 14th.

The user who made the original post ... and receives no notification that they exist
Not true. In my test community I received notifications for comments that were screened as suspicious. Can't test for visibility because I am also the maintainer of my test community.

[ron_newman]

Are you both the user who made the original post, and the maintainer of the community?

[fiddlingfrog]

Yes. So either I got the notification as the original poster, or as the maintainer. Not sure which yet.

[darkhavens]

I've just gone through all of my comms, searching for 'spam protected' comments and I found some, but it wasn't easy.

The screened comments were in a comm that has a custom layout which is also used for the comments page. To see this new "Read N suspicious comments" link, I had to look at each page with ?format=light appended to the url.

Thanks, lj. I really had nothing better to do with those two hours... :(

[ron_newman]

What was the earliest posting date where you found these?

[darkhavens]

15th April.

[darkhavens]

Also, a friend stumbled over a link to the whitelist page, which, oddly enough, didn't show up for me.

She found it on the Community Settings page, just under the last radio button text in the bottom righthand box, but when I look at that page, there is no link.

Here is the link:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/whitelist.bml?authas=COMM-NAME-HERE