SPAM BLOG COMMENT AUTOMATICALLY MARKED APPROVED INSTEAD OF PENDING

[BeverlyM]

Hello - 

We have blog comments set to need approval.  I was just notified by email of a blog comment that needed approval:

             

But when I went into the blog page comments it was already marked approved, rather than going into the pending folder.  It is a spam email.  It says they were commenting on "OA and YouTube" which is not a blog we have on our site, so I do not have anywhere to go look to see if something is actually posted somewhere.

I googled the email address and it appears this same spammer has posted an very similar message to another site's blog, but in that case included links.

Questions: 

1) How did this get approved automatically and how do I stop that from happening again?

2) How can I ensure this is NOT actually posted on our website somewhere...we have years of blogs I would need to wade through, and too many things show up when using search.

Thank you.

[Adam7]

Hi, @BeverlyM.

Which of your blogs received the comment? I see that one blog on your site requires approval for comments, but the other blog does not.

[BeverlyM]

Hi Adam - 

I'm confused...we only have one blog page (unless you are looking at our unpublished sites, which are only backup copies?) and the general settings for all blog posts are to require approval.  Where are you seeing another blog?

I do see that for individual blog posts we have the option to allow for posting without approval, but we never use that.

The comment came in as being made on a non-existent post called "OA and YouTube."  I moved it from the approved folder to the spam folder.

[BeverlyM · Accepted solution]

Hi Adam - 

I discovered that we did have some old blogs that were marked "open" for comments, so now have gone into them all (hopefully) and changed them to require approval.  

Thank you for looking into it for me...mystery solved.

Beverly