Have you lost your comments? Have you commented on the site and then not seen the comment appear? Well it could be there now, or if not I may have addressed the problem.

Behind the scenes MovableType runs Filmstalker, and within it there is an automatic spam filtering system that stops spam from getting through. Part of it runs by checking sites that gather spam IP addresses.

Lately MT announced that one of those sites had ceased to operate and advised all their customers to change to a new option, The SpamHaus Project (zen.spamhaus.org), so I updated.

What happened then, and I just found out thanks to Simone, is that a large portion of legitimate comments intended for the site ended up in the junk folder.

I've just gone through over two and a half thousand comments and republished those that were junked, apologies to some regular readers, some new, and most of all the people who have been commenting on the Fast and the Furious posts.

Now I'm aware of it I'll keep my eye on the junk comments and I'm making some behind the scenes changes to ensure that this doesn't happen again. I have no idea why some of you have been marked as spammers by this site, but I would be checking up and complaining if I were you.

Meanwhile this has overloaded the server and the hosting company are concerned about the high CPU usage again. You know there just doesn't seem to be any way of winning in this one.

Update: So I think I've solved the problems now, however there's something to note for other sites that use the SpamHaus Project, many legitimate people are being marked as spam.

Now I'm noticing that a huge majority of my readers are, so if you were to go to other sites who use this system, or send an email to someone who has a spam system that uses this lookup, you'll get junked. The answer is easy though, if you're on the list then email SpamHaus and they remove you, and really quickly too.

We tried this last night as Vic had the problem. Within fifteen minutes of emailing them he was appearing on the site without any markdown against their spam list.

So if you want to know if you're on the list then just drop a comment in the thread and make sure to add your email address, I'll tell you if the SpamHaus is marking you as spam, and then you go to them with your IP address (which I can provide) and get the mark removed. Easy as that.