You know about spam, but what does ham have to do with blogging?

I love readers’ comments on my blog, but in addition to those I get a huge number of spam comments.

I wish there were a lot more comments so I hope that that builds over time.

One challenge to having a dialogue via comments on a blog is that there is so much spam.

How much spam you might ask?

You may be surprised to learn that my blog receives 1,000 spam comments a month. And this number seems to be rising at an alarming rate.

My spam filter is pretty good and in fact it may be a little too good. It essentially never lets a spam comment through, but every now and then it classifies a real comment as spam. You might call this a “false positive”.  Comments that are not spam but are in fact good ones are classified as “ham”. I bet you didn’t know that.

Ham is good, spam is bad. So when my filter thinks that ham is spam, that’s a problem.

I apologize as this seems to have happened a bit more lately, but as you can imagine it is difficult for me to manually go through 1,000 comments per month that the system thinks are spam in my hunt for ham.

However, I will try!

Also please email me at knoepflerATucdavisDOTedu if you submitted a comment and it didn’t show up within 24 hours.

Keep on commenting!