(Originally posted 2/28/17, reposting 1/17/23 since we get this question all the time about a comment not showing up. Just to reiterate: there’s a WordPress system that decides what shows and what goes to moderation and what goes to spam. It’s almost never a manual decision. Comments do sometimes get manually trashed, most often for referrals that weren’t allowed and occasionally for other reasons.)
One question that gets asked over and over in the comment section is ‘why isn’t my comment showing up?’ I thought it would be worth putting out a dedicated post on this to explain more and so that we’ll have something to link to in the future when the question comes up.
There are four possible reasons why your comment isn’t showing up.
Comment Moderation
Many comments aren’t automatically approved by the system and await manual moderation before they’ll appear. Since we don’t have 24/7 staffing on DoC, it might take a few hours – or even a few days on rare occasions – until the comment appears. Please give it time.
Usually, after one comment is approved, the system will recognize your email address and auto-approve future comments. If the comment contains a link, it might still go into moderation for manual approval. If you use a different email address, your comment will go into moderation again.
Referrals
We have some posts on the site dedicated for readers to post their referral link. Please do not put your referral in other places where they aren’t warranted. The discussion ends up getting drown out by referrals and no meaningful conversation on the topic can ensue. Due to that, we try to remove these referral comments or the part of the comment which contains a referral.
Even in posts where we allow referrals, we usually (but not always) require that no additional words are added to the comment aside from the referral link or code. If you add any words, for example ‘thanks’, your comment will likely get trashed.
From experience, often half of all referral comments get trashed. I doubt anyone means anything bad; most likely they just scanned the post quickly or not at all and didn’t follow the correct format. In any case, that’s another reason a comment won’t show.
Note, once your comment gets spammed or trashed, the system will automatically make it more difficult for your future comments to get approved or auto-approved.
Offensive Comment
We don’t moderate the content of the comments and readers are free to express their opinions, including criticism. However, if a comment is racist/sexist/homophobic it will be removed. We try to only remove the offensive part and leave the rest of the comment.
Spam Filter
The spam filter will sometimes flag a comment as spam. These comments don’t show up in the standard Pending queue, and we never see them unless we look for them specifically.
It’s rare that a legitimate comment will get tagged as spam, but it certainly happens. Most commonly, the comment is either long or includes a link and somehow gets flagged.
If you don’t see your comment, and none of the previous reasons apply, please let us know via email! You can also try putting another comment on the blog (the other comment might go through). Once that comment is approved, it’s less likely to happen again. But please, please, give it a couple of days before reaching out as it often takes a few hours or even days until we get through all the comments.
Related posts:
Test
testing
Testing
test
Test
test
Test
Test
This was useful. Might be good to link it to future ‘share your referral’ posts so people know why they are getting an orange exclamation on their comment.
Sorry for an OT question. Where could we post comments about problems with the new discussion format? I used to get E-mails when someone pinged me (@Erik). However this stopped after the new format was implemented.
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/update-to-comments/