Why do some comments need approval, and others appear automatically.

It's in your your comment approval settings. It's set so that comments by the same person just have to be approved the first time, then are automatically approved the next. If you want to bypass that and let all comments auto-approve then you can uncheck the comment. However, you might get spam.

Hope that helps

That helps tremendously.

i really love that you used the word circumvent in a thread title. that is all. =0)