Why Does My Comment Not Show

I seem to get a email every other day from people about there commenting not appearing. I should probably explain how I handle comments. I really think comments make or break a blog for the author. Honestly if it wasn't for the feedback (positive and negative) it would be pretty boring to blog. So my goal is to make commenting as painless as possible for users to express there opinions. Now sure that sounds great and all but this blog is something I do in my free time... so.. that becomes a issue. It also means that there are a lot of things going on "behind the scenes" when a comment is placed so there can be a balence of ease of use yet good comment moderation. So here is how my comments work. When a user comments its first checked against the akismet plugin that installs with wordpress. Now this plugin is not perfect so I use dillsmacks akismet white list to allow users to comment that are banned in akismet (like Danny Sullivan lol ). The first custom check I do is check the comment/ip/username against a local_blacklist. I work together with a few other webmasters to develop a black_list of ips and emails of users who are jackasses. Its well labeled and all of those comments go straight in the can. Next it checks to see if this user has ever commented before. If they have not it puts the comment in the moderation que. If they have it goes to the next check. The simplest check is for outbound urls. Any comment containing any link is held no for moderation no matter what. This is just a catchall check. Then it checks the comment for over 500 different word combinations. These 500 word combinations are not necessarily spam but just thinks in general that someone needs to look at before its approved. I would say probably 98% of the time these are approved within a hour or so but again its just items I have flagged that someone needs to look at before approving. Some examples of these are companies I own, racial slurs, swear words and stuff like that. Reason I flag companies I own is many times I want to know if someone has a comment on a company I own and possibly I like to follow up with them. The racial slur check rarely has a match and when it does its not always used as a racial slur. Swear words for the most part go through unless its extremely vulgar. Recently with the top comm enters thing attracting a lot of spammers I built in a custom check to calculate a little algorithm of my own which takes into account the length of comment mixed with average time in between comments and automatically blacklists people who break that threashold. So if you see someone who goes from 40 to zero comments thats why. Its always pretty obvious when people get greedy and start commenting on every post with "yeah" or "I agree"... I think this upsets some webmasters when people try to game their system... Me? I enjoy it! I love writing tools to find anomalies and do fraud detection. Its what I did for 5 years as the lead security engineer for one of the biggest banks in the world. 5 people have the ability to approve comments on this blog. I only approve about 10% and really the only ones I approve are ones they think I need to see for business purposes. If your comment does not show and you think your banned by Akismet or something else shoot me a line and I or someone else can look into it. Anyway hope this clears up some stuff if anyone cared ;)