Sorry about the comments approval shit
Fact is this is a leaky old boat. We might have to leave it up for the archives and more onto a newer model for posting and commenting.
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If you have a lot of accumulated moderation rules, it’s possible they may be interacting in some unexpected way. Have you tried deleting ALL of your moderation rules to see if commenting returns to normal? (save the rules so you can re-enter them one by one).
We don’t have many rules but it still sounds like a hood idea.
We have a great many IP addresses on the blacklist. I’ve considered deleting them too, but I’m not sure I want to have to re-ban everyone
Comcast and Verizon reassign new IP addresses sporadically. Your banned users may not even have the same IP address anymore.
IIRC moderation rules are just in one big list separated by commas or something. One possibility is if one of the commas was missing, that might produce some mangled word that just happens to be a common word in every comment. Same thought for how the banned IP list might be corrupted.
If I’m right, the problem would be toward the end of the list. A classic troubleshooting tactic is to go back to the last known “good” day, and see what rules or bans were added since then.