Akismet question and comments issue

I’ve searched the forums, and can’t find a working solution to this problem. I’m hoping maybe someone here can offer up an alternate explanation for me.

I got an email from a friend last night that he tried to respond to comment left on his site. He was already logged in as admin, he wrote his comment and hit “Submit”, and was immediately faced with a blank white page. His comment did not go through (wasn’t even held for moderation, it was as if it had never happened). I’ve checked the error logs, and there’s no error messages showing up at all. He says he tried it twice, then went back to his admin area and logged in again – after doing so he successfully left a comment.

Everything I can find on this says to me that he happened to leave his comment during a “Server burp”. I’ve tried to replicate it 4 times, even through different platforms and browsers, and cannot for the life of me. If anyone knows of some other alternate reason this happened to him, that would be great – but I’m so leaning towards “get over it, it happens sometimes” LOL

The second question is I activated Akismet for him. I have it set to automatically delete comments placed on posts that are over a month old. Someone posted a comment on his site (a valid comment, by the way) on a post that was over a *year* old. He could also post comments on this same post. I figure *he* could because he’s the admin. But the lady who commented isn’t a subscriber or anything. DId she just slip through? or is there some setting I’m not aware of?

in the end, he wants to know if he can change the “1 month” to “1 year”. Is that possible, or is this a setting that’s totally controlled by Akismet, and we either have to use it or not use it? (He also has Bad Behavior installed, so if we can shut it off, will it still catch all the nasty spam junk so he doesn’t have to go through and kill hundreds of comments every day?)