[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #8968: Spam comments should produce 'awaiting moderation' feedback

[WordPress Trac]

#8968: Spam comments should produce 'awaiting moderation' feedback
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 Reporter:  tellyworth             |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  defect (bug)           |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal                 |    Milestone:  2.8      
Component:  General                |      Version:           
 Severity:  normal                 |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:  has-patch 2nd-opinion  |  
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Comment (by filosofo):

 Replying to [comment:12 tellyworth]:
 > >I think it's reasonable to say that comments getting falsely flagged as
 spam happens much more often than human spammers attempting to game the
 system of a particular blog
 >
 > Sorry but this is not the case.
 [[br]]

 I'm intrigued.  What you say implies that either the number of ''human''
 spammers is greater than the number of real commenters or that anti-spam
 systems in general have a false negative rate multiple times greater than
 their false positive rate.
 [[br]]

 If it's the former, since you also say that "Akismet produces different
 results on different blogs," then we're not talking about a human tweaking
 spam comment variables to succeed across millions of blogs; we're talking
 about millions of humans each tweaking spam comment variables for a
 particular blog, and only that particular blog.  Is this really what
 happens? How do we know?
 [[br]]
 [[br]]

 > >if you produce a message to the extent that the comment is awaiting
 moderation, then a legit user whose comment has been spammed might think
 that it will be moderated out of spam status when it more likely won't be.
 >
 > This is a non sequitur.  The patch does not affect the probability that
 a false positive will be discovered and approved.
 [[br]]

 Sure it does.  People don't check the spam queue very often; it's too much
 work. They do check the moderation queue. A commenter knows this, so when
 he sees "comment in moderation" he doesn't do anything, confident that it
 will be taken care of. But when the comment disappears (or says
 "spammed"), he is more likely to contact the blog author to alert her to
 the problem.  I've done it myself a number of times.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8968#comment:13>
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