How to ask a question?

[Bert Roos]

Yesterday, I tried to post a question, but that was considered spam. Then I tried to rephrase the question, but that still was considered spam.

What to do to get through that?

[Joe Clark]

Hi Bert,

Messages that get flagged as spam go into a queue for manual approval before being posted. Give it a couple of days for us to get to it, and eventually it should be approved.

[Bert Roos]

Thanks!

Honestly, I feel this period is really long.

[Joe Clark]

Thanks for the feedback.

We know it's not ideal - we use an automated system to try and detect spam messages, and unfortunately it's not as good as a human at doing this, leading to the inevitable queue of "false positives" that need to get processed manually.

Unfortunately Answers has become a prime target for certain spam attacks recently that have been so severe they've almost brought the site down on several occasions - we've had to choose this fairly draconian approach in order to keep the site operational.

We are working on some better systems to fight the spam accounts and hopefully they will be operational in the next few weeks.

Thanks for using Answers! :-)

[Bert Roos]

Thanks for your reaction!

One last thing: Even my reaction on which you're responding now was at first classified as spam, so I wonder whther you are classifying accounts as spam accounts. If so, can you mark me as safe?

[Joe Clark]

The system should eventually learn that your account is safe - in fact I have checked and your account should be fine now. Let me know if you continue to have problems with it, because then that may be a bug.

I don't want to go into the details of how this works, since 'security by obscurity' is a reasonable line of defence against the spammers at the moment. :-)

[Bert Roos]

Thanks! My previous comment wasn't considered spam, so it seems to work :)