One of the sins brought up in the recent SiteProNews article on Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability By Linda Bustos, is not moderating comments.
Linda says:
Allowing anyone and everyone to post whatever they want in your comments section is asking for spam. Not only is this annoying to your readers, but it really takes down the professionalism of your blog.
I think I will really have to disagree with this point. The key in creating successful blogs is really the conversations and relationships they create. If every single comment on your blog is moderated, I think it effectively cuts off the most powerful aspect of blogging.
I mentioned a while back how to make conversations work for blogs, and my #1 point is not to require comment moderation. The key concern with all the comment moderation stuff is just spam comments, and I think we need to address the issue by doing something with the spam, and not banish all our comments to the moderation queue.
For my own blog, whether I moderate my comments or not, I will still need to use a spam filter software. Why is that so? Because I receive at least 200 spam comments every single day, and I really don’t want to go through all 200 spam comments to sieve out the ones that are genuine. I want to leave that job to the spam comment filter software.
Luckily for us, Akismet, the spam filter that ships with WordPress, does really well. At least, 99% of comment spam is captured.
So what happens if some spam fails to get caught and then appears in your blog? What happens to the 1% that doesn’t get caught by the spam filter?
That is a great question.
A good blogger keeps track of the comments that appear on his or her blog, and when the occasional spam falls though, I simply log in and delete it. Simple? Afterall, spam comments are just nonsensical comments, and I feel that as long as you take action to get it deleted the next time you log in, readers will understand.
I think we really need to weigh the pros and cons between moderating and not moderating comments, and I feel for the price of the occasional spam comment (which will appear for a maximum of 24 hours in my case), the conversation is really worthwhile.
We should fight spam, not discourage comments.
Your thoughts?
I also have Spam Karma 2 plugin installed. When ever a spam message through, I never delete it. Instead, I go to my SK2 options and ban the IP and if unusual I will ban the domain. Even if you don’t use SK2, rather than delete, it’s probably better to go to the MANAGE/Comments and mass edit the approved comments, and change it to spam. This way, Akismet will know it’s spam.
The reason for stuff like this, is that if you do have conversation and people are subscribing to the comments, you may delete the spam comments but they will keep trying – and all the subscribers will see every single one of them.
PS: I never use moderated comments or captha either 🙂 What’s worse? having to register to comment? YUCK!
Thanks Hart. Yep, yep! Akismet is great because it is uses a central database of filters and as long as we continue to submit our spam comments to them, it will only get better!
I’m concerned with banning IP addresses though. Its lucky that Spam Karma allows the genuine commenter to at least save themselves by keying in a CAPTCHA (or is it something else?)
The reason for my concern is that I don’t use a static IP address. Every time I reconnect to my ISP (i.e. everyday), I get a new IP address, and it has more than once that I realise that my IP address has already been black labelled by Spam Karma.
Obviously, someone else using my ISP is doing some spamming somewhere, but I get the black list when I take over the IP address. It sucks.
Moderating comments is already bad enough. Having to create an account to comment is crazy, and can’t be bothered to do that at all!
There are issues using IP addresses, I know. My philosophy (the cuppeth half full) is that if I ban the IP, it’s probably one of a dozen hacked accounts anyway, so it will probably be used again and again or it will only be used for the day and useless. The domains I never hesitate to ban seem to be the .ru .it and .br ones. For all the others, I blacklist the domain of the URL that they claim as the website as well. I’m not sure if that stops them or not.
I’ve been getting most of my comment spam on posts that have about 10 words or more in the post title.
Hi, Linda Bustos here. Hey I didn’t mean you should be a comment nazi to the point you’re muzzling honest feedback. What I mean is if you don’t moderate your comments at all, it’s easy for spammers to come and swamp your comments with links and irrelevant self promotion. This interrupts the bona fide conversation and makes it irritating for users. Why not just moderate comments to make sure these nonsensical or sometimes inflammatory remarks don’t clutter up the conversation? I use Akismet on my wordpress blog and you are not required to login to comment.
Hi Kian Ann,
I agree with Linda, at time we do need to moderate the comment when some nasty people just leave a nasty comment on the blog which is not true. When it is brought to your attention, it may has cause damage already. This is just how I feel, anyway not every commentor are like us right? 🙂
Hi Linda,
Personally, one of the big reasons to NOT moderate comments is simply because moderation suppresses active conversation. That’s what Kian’s post about encouraging conversation points out. Bloggers can respond to each other so quickly via trackbacks and comments, and it’s likely that the comment moderator will not be able to keep on top of approving the real comments v. deleting the spam.
Honestly, thinking about the blogs I frequent that have some great comment conversations, I don’t think ANY of them use moderation. Most blogs that require moderation (that I’ve seen) have few comments and don’t really get true “conversations.”
But this definitely all gets down to personal preferences. Luckily we can all do what we think is best and still get along. 🙂
Andrew
Hi Andrew, John and Linda,
First of all, thanks for stopping by! Well, I think there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Take for example, the above conversation wouldn’t have happened if I have moderated comments (i.e. Andrew would not have seen Linda and John’s comments if I was not actively at my computer) On the downside, some spam comments may slip through, and it might cause you some disturbance.
Comment moderation allows you to control exactly what is shown in your comments, so it is also a great thing if you have many nasty “human spam commentors”.
Hart,
Isn’t spam such an irritating thing at times? Sometimes I start to doubt if making web technology easy for newcomers is a good thing.
Without the fundamental knowledge of the web and its workings, more people are getting online and contributing to the junk. Its disgusting.
I don’t actually blame these spammers, because I believe there must be a good reason why they are doing what they are doing. Maybe they are not taught well enough? Who knows?
I honestly believe that the solution to things like this will not lie is the remedy (i.e. spam filters), but in preventing such a thing from happening in the first place (i.e. educating these people well).
Any suggestions how we can pull this off? A worldwide anti-comment-spam day?
I agree completely. Nothing bugs me more when commenting on a blog than when I see the line “your comment is awaiting moderation”. Like you said, any good blogger should be keeping tabs on the comments left on their blog anyway.
I would much rather let everything come in realtime, let Akismet pickup 99.9% of the spam, and if a spam comment makes its way through here or there, I can easily delete it after the fact. This is far less intrusive to the user (and to the blogger for that matter) than moderating every single comment that comes through.
Thanks Brandon. I guess it also depends on how often we get back to the blog, and how serious a spam comment can mean to your blog.
If the “delete after the fact” method has dire consequences (e.g. like if you are hosting a political blog, or a business blog and frequently tread on sensitive issues), then it might make sense to moderate all comments.
Professional interests blogs on issues which are lighter weight – that really want to generate conversations (where two spam comments running around is not a problem), should consider not using moderation.
A way to ensure that you do not get numerous spam comments is to use word verification which I have applied. Thus far, it seemed to have worked for me.
Generally, as a rule, I don’t moderate comments or delete them unless they are truly offensive or slanderous.
Kian Ann .. I was going to bookmark this, but thought I would post it here .. I’ll probably never use it, but it’s a good idea for those looking for something like this:
Peter’s Useful Crap
http://www.theblog.ca/?p=21
It’s a custom anti-spam image wordpress plugin
Thanks Walter,
I remember there was once which I used the CAPTCHA (word verification), but it seems like spammers still find a way through it, but I guess it is the only way out for blogger blogs, right?
Hart, thanks for sharing! 😉
Great conversation here and good point about the usability of the blogger his/herself and the moderation message also being irritating to users. I see now that there is a bit of usability give-and-take here and that each blogger can make his or her own choice as to what works best for them.
Thanks Linda! Yes, I think the awareness is important – once we are all aware of the consequences of a choice, we can make better choices! 🙂
Pingback: Taking the Middle Ground on Comment Moderation — Thinking Home Business