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Mysterious Disappearances

Several of you have recently brought my attention to the fact that on some occasions, your comments seem to have disappeared into the aether.  This has happened to me several times before, and indeed, happened to me today. I have no idea why it happens, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it happens. All I know is that, when it does, if I try later, or on a different device (my computer rather than an iPhone), the problem disappears.

Anyway, I don't know what to do about it besides (A) reporting the problem to Typepad, which I'm going to momentarily, and (B) advising everyone to "copy" their comments before they submit them. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of time typing up a comment that disappears into the netherworld…

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4 responses to “Mysterious Disappearances”

  1. Argo

    my experience with vanishing comments made me think it’s got something to do with length, i.e., comments too long tend not to make it.

    Reply
  2. Marcus Arvan

    Sometimes that seems to be the case, but today I had a very short comment disappear.

    Reply
  3. Gradjunct

    I don’t know about typepad, but on other blogging platforms, I know that comments might also be removed if they contain words or phrases that a sniffing program is designed to “sniff out” as being offensive or spam-related, or if they contain links.
    I am not saying anyone’s post contained anything actually offensive. But sometimes the sniffing programs are not well calibrated to their task and wind up removing innocuous material needlessly.

    Reply
  4. Helen De Cruz

    Hi Marcus: what happens is that your comments get eaten by Typepad’s overactive spam filter. It happens at our blog (NewApps) as well.
    To remedy this, you just get the comments out of the spam folder and unmark them as spam.
    You login to typepad and choose Philosophers Cocoon, there you find three tabs: overview, posts, comments. There select “comments”. You find a small pulldown menu next to “comments”, where you can select “spam comments”. You open that folder and there you can mark the spam comments that aren’t really spam comments as published comments.

    Reply

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