Thanks to Joe Malchow, our Akismet spam filter now seems to be working very well — nearly all the comments that end up in the Spam folder (probably about 1000 or so per day) are genuine spam.
But for reasons that remain mysterious, some legitimate comments, plus a few spam comments, end up being held for approval. This isn’t because they have vulgarities or any such thing; I don’t know how Akismet does its magic, but I just know that there are some false positives in the filter.
This means that those comments might be delayed for a few hours, until I next get a chance to approve them. Sorry about that, but at least it’s much better than having the legitimate comments be mixed in with the spam flood (which is what was happening for the past few weeks), which often caused them to be lost altogether. So please bear with us when this happens.