ron_newman)Sometime earlier this month, LiveJournal introduced a "Spam Protection" feature which screens comments made to any community or personal journal. LJ turned this on by default for all communities without any notice to community maintainers. LJ belatedly and incompletely described the new feature in this news announcement, several days or weeks after releasing it.
In an LJ community, this feature has the following effect:
- Comments that contain links (to domains not on a secret whitelist) are automatically hidden and moved to a "Suspicious Comments" page
- The user who made the original post cannot see these hidden comments and receives no notification that they exist
- Community maintainers also receive no notification that the hidden comments exist
- Community maintainers CAN look at the hidden comments, and then mark them as non-spam, but only if the maintainers know to look for them periodically in each and every new post to the community
If you maintain a community, and this doesn't sound good to you, turn the feature OFF by going to http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=privacy, selecting your community from the "Work as user:" menu, and then UNCHECK the checkbox labelled "Spam Protection Comments containing a link to a non-whitelisted domain will be marked as spam and moved to a special section."
I also recommend that you look over all of the comment pages from the last two weeks or so in your community, and see if any of them have an "(Read N suspicious comments") link on them. If they do, follow the link and mark each comment on that page as non-spam (using this button: )
The members of your community will appreciate this.