If you realized that the nurtured spiritual part of yourself would accompany you on your eternal journey and that everything that you have labored so hard to accumulate would vanish the instant you depart this world, would it alter your daily agenda? – Walter Cooper
I help out a little in the WordPress.com technical support forums answering questions and helping with problems where I can. It’s an interesting experience and I find joy in being able to help people out. A lot of it is simply answering the same questions over and over. The search functions in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and forums leaves a little (OK, more like a lot) to be desired, but a good portion of people don’t even attempt to search, they just type in a (many times cryptic) question and hit the submit button. Some of us (volunteers all) that help out have files we keep on our desktop with answers to questions asked frequently and with links to FAQ’s and answers that already exist. With questions we have an answer for in our file, we just copy and paste. No sense describing (inventing) the wheel over and over again.
A small portion of the posts are frantic and thick with drama, in effect saying, “my blog is my life and if this problem or that isn’t solved this moment, my life is over.” Panic, fear, stress, doom! One such case lately has to do with a bug in the Akismet spam filter used at wordpress.com. The bug, according to WordPress staff is ellusive and they have not been able to track it down. Since 92% of the comments made on blogs are spam, disabling it is not really an option (some blogs get over 4,000 spams a day), and because the software used at WordPress.com is multiuser, it would be difficult to give us each the option to turn it off on our individual blogs. There are a number of us caught up in this bug (don’t really know how many) that are not able to review all the comments caught by Akismet so we cannot tell if it is catching legitimate comments or not (apparently for some it is). A problem to be sure, but is it really the end of your world?
I took care of this by putting an explanation of the problem on my “Contact/Comments” page, so if you make a comment and your comment doesn’t show up within a day or two at the most, use my contact page and I’ll manually add your comment for you until such time as WordPress solves the problem.
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