To start with, here are some comments that your spam filter might well exclude for you:

thanx soooo much! I have digit: ” games on present perfect” on google and here you are! exellent!

Good.

very excellent

Thaks very good your ideas..

I find them wonderful, and very beneficial idea. Thank you!

Thanks a lot 4 the suggestions.. They are really useful

Many thanks! you have saved me!

The only problem is that none of these were spam. No, TEFL blogs don’t have special grammar nazi spam filters. It is because general comments with no direct reference to the post, especially when they have a link, are generally exactly that and get picked up automatically. Even more so if they have certain key words that spam filters look out for, as some of these do. These are all from the TEFL.net Classroom Ideas page, including about half of the comments on my article on Present Perfect Games, and we have had to rescue comments like this from the spam filter before.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had the same problem here on my blog, with the exception of the worksheets pages, but therein lies another problem.

Despite a link to this blog being given at the end of all my articles, the vast majority of commenters here are native speakers. The rest are very proficient users. Making a bold generalisation, I would say that the vast number of classroom hours of English are taught by people who are neither. So, why aren’t they commenting here? And does that mean they aren’t reading? My use of the third person seems to suggest that I think the answer is that they aren’t.

Despite my middle class guilt tripping on the matter, you might have noticed that I don’t put any real effort into righting that wrong. For one thing, I can’t bear to simplify my language in my free time. Love of my life my better half might be, but if she’d been Elementary when we met back in my Elementary Japanese days, it would have gone no further! Ditto for topics. If it don’t interest me, ain’t gonna get written for free on my blog. And if it’s totally unrelated to my own very special situation as a native speaker who took the CELTA DELTA Private Language School route, it isn’t likely to interest me.

So, should I just stop reading the Guardian and learn to relax, or is there a real problem here? And if there is, should we be doing something about it rather than just wringing our hands?