Is Disqus killing your Web conversations?

Hopefully Pauli will indulge me in this little exploration of one of the weirder things I've run across recently and not, believe it or not, said or instigated by Rod Dreher.

No, I'm talking about Disqus' increasingly dreaded Terminator "Detected As Spam" filter.

I actually tried Disqus myself some months ago before just throwing in the towel, thinking, well, maybe it's just my pugnacious writing style (I know, I'm probably being way too hard on myself). But when I started asking around, I was surprised to find, at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances, that I was in the majority, not the minority, including a few who ran their own Web sites and had previously tried to use Disqus as a comment manager.

The main thing that infuriated both ordinary commenters and Webmasters who utilized Disqus alike was its crazy positive feedback learning algorithm (don't ask me what that means). In other words, it uses its own automatically marking someone's comment as spam as a rule that reinforces its automatically marking someone's next comment as spam as a rule that reinforces its automatically marking someone's next comment as spam as a rule that reinforces... You get the idea. Those acquaintances who ran their own little sites finally had to kill the Disqus beast because it was costing them viewers irritated at their treatment, not to mention the time wasted digging into their logs to un-spam Disqus victims.

Disqus actually has a page where its victims can petition for relief, but, as one might expect, it reads like an early draft of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mainly because Disqus uses its filter on that page, too, which means, yes, you guessed it, penitents wishing to be absolved of their spamnation so as to avoid further spamnation only find their petitions marked as spam, thus - yes, furthering their spamnation.

Overall, this process is not unlike dealing with too large a population of medical patients by giving everyone something marginally lethal in order to reduce the problem to manageable proportions.

Am I just running with the wrong crowd? Or have you or your friends had a run-in with Disqus, too?

Thank God for Pauli using Google, who in its severest moments only asks if one is a robot.