Commentators here have experienced serious problems since about 12 days ago.

Before that, there was hardly spam comments (viagra ads and the like) on this blog and comments were running relatively smooth.

Then Typepad, the company that runs the basic system of this and many other blogs, introduced a new feature. Like usually, they didn’t bother to inform their customers about this.

Since the new feature was introduced, any comment with more than a few words of plain text is somewhat considered as spam and a CAPTCHA number input is required. Often comments are outright rejected as spam.

There is no way for me to shut off this feature. It is not specific to this blog, but other blogs running on Typepad have the same problem and are also complaining.

As part of the new feature anything falsly identified as spam is now placed in a special folder I can review. I can also manually release comments caught in this scheme from the folder.

But to have real time comments, as it should be, this would require me to sit in front of the screen all day and do nothing else.

This morning there were 48 entries in the spam-folder, 46 of those were legitimate comments (many redundant as people have tried several times.) Two were indeed spam. When 96% of "spam" is legitimate commenting, the spam detection is obviously misconfigurated.

Since December 6, I have complained several times and asked the Typepad help-staff a list of quite specific question. I have received no real answer to my questions on who, what, why, what to do. Instead, they sent me links to some superficial knowledgebase pieces which do not answer any questions and to marketing texts that laud the new feature. Today they asked me if I have any specific questions. Huh?

For now I’ll manually release the comments falsly caught as spam. If your comment is caught as such, please do not try to enter it again. I will try to release such comments as often as I find time, which should be several times a day.

When I release such comments, they have the timemark of when they were posted by you. Therefore, as the comment threads are chronological, you suddenly may find "new" comments upthread.

Between the coming holidays I should finally find some time to move the blog away from Typepad. The company has several times shown behaviour like this, i.e. interfered with the blogs the customers pay them to run and being completely unresponsive when they screw up.

It delivers a bad service that does not deserve customers at all.

Typepad sucks.