UPDATE: Google Did It!
The intrepid web dude, Thomas Hruska, at Tucson Newspapers, which provides the backend support for TucsonCitizen.com, has solved the commenting problem: Google did it.
Google, which acquired the ReCaptcha program we use to make sure commenters on the site are real people, made a change to the program March 23 that caused some comments to be filtered to spam folders.
It’s fixed now, so comment away. Thanks for your patience.
To read more about how Google broke our comment program, go here.
If you have commented on a TucsonCitizen.com blog post recently and it didn’t show up, you’re not being censored.
We recently came under spam attack from a company unhappy with one of our bloggers. We cranked up the sensitivity of our spam filtering program and unfortunately it’s been scooping up legitimate comments.
However, it’s not doing it with any particular pattern, some comments from commenters are getting through and some aren’t. That shouldn’t happen.
We’re working on the problem and should have it solved Monday.
In the meantime, I will be checking the spam filters regularly over the weekend and releasing any legitimate comments from spam prison until the problem is solved.
Mark B. Evans
Editor, TucsonCitizen.com