I know we all like delicious SPAM, but since a lot of us don’t like the electronic flavor, the website has an automoderator lurking in the shadows, trying its best to protect us from the unsavoriness of the wild web.

Unfortunately, I’d call it (and most other AI-type robots that do this sort of thing) a P1 or maybe P2 on a good day. It knows to not pull its reserve handle instead of its brake toggles, but it does often land with the wind and blows its launches a lot.

Sometimes the automoderator gets false positives on new topics or replies. From your point of view, it will look like your post just disappeared. WTF? Luckily, this doesn’t happen very often, and I can count on one hand the number of folks that it’s “punished” (through no fault of their own), but I thought I might throw up a short list of things that it tends to trigger its spidey senses:

• Really long topics/replies
• Topics/replies with a lot of links or images
• Words/phrases/grammatical patterns that it thinks are “spammy”
• Several edits to the same topic/reply in a short period of time (this one gets triggered the most)

Long-term, the plan is to remove the automod completely, but that’s a process (have to make sure we’re keeping all of the bots out while not having to have a human babysit new signups). In the meantime, if you think you’ve been automodded, fire off an email to info@crestlinesoaring.org and I’ll un-spam your post as soon as I see it.