Housekeeping Notes: Friday Five Hiatus, Comment Maintenance

We have a couple of housekeeping notes to share today to both answer a recurring question and give you a head’s up before we make some changes.

First, you may have noticed that the Friday Five hasn’t posted for the past couple of weeks. That’s because we realized that since Chuck airs on Fridays now, that day is packed with new content. The Friday Five was initially envisioned to fill a void of information/new content. The cycle used to be lots of news, interviews, etc. on Monday, episode follow up on Tuesday (music, ratings), and the podcast around Wednesday or Thursday. Discussion usually tapered off by Thursday as well, so the Friday Five was a shot of fresh Chuckness to finish up the cycle and head into the weekend. Now all of the Monday stuff is on Fridays, the Tuesday stuff is on Saturdays, etc., and the Friday Five gets lost in the mix. Don’t worry, if counting Chuck-related things in fives is your bag, it’s not gone forever; right now we plan to post it on Fridays when there’s no new episode of Chuck.

Second, we’ll be making some changes to the comment system this weekend. The current system has served us well for 4+ years, but the drastic increase in spambot comments over the past few weeks is making a noticeable impact, at least to us. Whereas before we might have 50-60 spambot comments in a week (annoying, but manageable), now we’re seeing 400-500. As you can see from the screencap below, we currently have 1,859 comments in the spam queue. And that’s after cleaning out a couple hundred.

We do have filters in place to catch most of the spam comments before you see them. Right now those filters seem to be about 90% accurate, meaning that some spam still gets through and some of your legitimate comments get caught in the filter (that’s why we can’t just outright delete comments in the queue; we need to go through and make sure they’re actually spam first). This weekend we’ll be implementing a few new protocols that we hope will bring that percentage up considerably, and mean we can spend more time posting Chuck news and less time reading offers to increase our SEO ranking or the size of our member. Ahem.

How does this maintenance affect you? While we implement these changes, the comment system may be offline periodically. By the way, if you’re wondering what triggers the filter and why your comment might end up in the queue, here are the most common reasons:

• You used a “moderated” word in your comment (swear words, derogatory terms, words frequently used by spambots like “loan” or “genuine”);
• Your comment contains more than one link;
• Your comment is longer than 2-3 lines;
• You posted several comments in a short amount of time;
• You’re posting from an IP address that has been flagged for spamming.