Hi, SE Readers. Joan here today. This is a short post, but the subject is something that could happen to any of us. No, I really didn’t go to jail. At least not a physical place with bars. It’s what we SE authors call Spam Jail.

Here at Story Empire, we are inundated with hundreds of spam comments each week. It takes six of us monitoring the site daily to filter and delete them. Incidentally, the problem worsened with the onset of GDPR, but I won’t open that can of worms today.

Most of the comments caught by the spam filter are in fact indeed spam, but on occasion, a legitimate comment is marked as such. Akismet requires a two-step process to “free” someone from spam jail. And you’d think it would recognize that we have approved some commenters countless times, but many times, that same person will go back…