In my post yesterday I noted that not all replies from Mastodon were federating as blog post comments. I did not think much of it back then. But today I saw those comments (and several others) in the spam section of my blog’s comments – they were also pending approvals.
Guessing that this is happening on the WordPress end. Still working out WP’s spam settings (FWIW, WP is correctly marking many of the comments as spam.) But if I can figure out these spam settings, it would be a really good way to control any potential of abuse around replies federating as comments.
Here is a Mastodon reply of mine that federated back as a WP comment, but got marked as spam (I am hiding the Mastodon handle of a user that I was replying to).
All I had to do was hit the approve button and it showed up just fine on my blog post:
Subtle reason why Mastodon replies don’t always federate
Another reason why replies may not federate: the Mastodon reply does not @-mention the blog’s handle/identifier.
For instance, if a Mastodon user sees a post by @rant.vpalepu.com on their Mastodon feed, but decide not to mention the blog’s handle/identifier (i.e., @rant.vpalepu.com) in their reply … then that Mastodon reply is not federating as a comment back to the blog post.
– vijay, still unpacking boxes … it never ends 📦
Winter Rant 
Leave a comment