Should You Enable Comment Moderation On Your Blog?
6 February 2008
20 CommentsWhat is Comment Moderation?
Comment moderation is a feature offered by most of the blogging platforms that allows you to prevent comments from appearing on your site without your express approval.
What do many bloggers think?
I know many bloggers around (I mean bloggers…) who almost consider enabling comment moderation, a principle. I talked to a few of such people and collected the reasons they give for enabling comment moderation.
- To prevent Comment-Spam
- To prevent displaying abusive comments
- To control the comments that speak against the idea presented in their posts
I had stumbled upon a blog a few days ago that emphasized that you should enable comment-moderation on your blog and make it a habit to regularly approve the comments from the moderation queue.
What do I think?
- I agree that comment moderation helps a lot in filtering out comment spam. Comment Spam is indeed a hated devil!
- I also agree that you can dis-approve abusive comments and get rid of them. Abusing is not one of the blogger-traits. Its really important that the commentator should mind his tongue and tone while commenting. By abusing, you’ll never be defaming the blog-author but only bringing yourself a bad name, from the supporting readership that may include people/bloggers you know well. Certainly not a healthy thing to do.
- I disagree that you should moderate the comments to filter out and dis-approve those comments that speak against the idea presented in your post. If you practice this, then your blog is not a blog but a personal website.
The essence of blogging is lost in one-way communication. Even if you believe that you are God, always bear in mind that there are atheists who don’t believe you. Also, the objective of criticism in comments at your blog is just getting into a discussion and extracting an optima out of it & not degrading you. Learn How to Respond to the Comments on your Blog effectively and try to take them as positively as you can.
But the point is,
Should You Enable Comment Moderation on Your Blog?
I have jotted down 4 main reasons why (I think) comment moderation should not be enabled on your blog:
- Everyone knows how to use Delete function. If you monitor your blog regularly for new comments and/or are notified about new comments on your blog via email, then you should be able to remove irresponsible spammy comments in a little time from when they are posted.
- If you approve comments from the moderation queue once or twice in a day, then its likely that during the time when the comments are held in moderation queue your visitors might miss a discussion that could have otherwise sparked up from an interesting idea or a form of criticism posted in a comment.
- You can, by mistake, delete or dis-approve a genuine comment while bulk-moderating. And a commentator may form a negative impression by this unintended gesture. Instead, you can delete the abusive or irresponsible comments when they are displayed on your blog. The visitors who might have seen such comments on your blog will appreciate not seeing that content later on.
- Only those bloggers use comment moderation to dis-approve comments that speak against the idea conveyed in their posts, who lack originality and fear getting exposed.
What do you think about this matter: Comment Moderation? Do you use comment moderation for holding up comments till you manually approve them or let all the comments appear on your blog but monitor them regularly and keep cleaning them up as soon as you spot a blot! Share your views, opinions and experiences with the rest of us reading this. Feel free to drop a comment and subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated with the latest posts at Inspirit.
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I’m pretty sure if this post would bring the pros & cons of enabling comment moderation to your blog readers. I don’t like to use delete button to get rid-off spammers. Spamming activity could be one of abusive thing to a blog. While abusive comments do not always harm you or your blog since it is a good sign of participation. Obviously, not many abusive commentators bluntly speak out their negative feedback in your comment form. I think they tend to hide themselves & their identity and will give it via email address or private contact form.
Absolutely not. The only moderation I use is for comments from new commentators where the comment contains 2 or more links. So if you are commenting for the first time AND your comment has more than one link, I get an email asking me to moderate. Otherwise it goes right up.
Also do not require registration to comment. Do not use captcha. Make it as easy as you can for legitimate people to comment.
Use tools like Akismet for WordsPress and be vigilant watching for the occasional manual spammer.
How do you know if a comment is a manual spam or not?
By the way Akismet removes the comments which are identical and are made from same IP address
nishu - I get a notice of every comment and then read all of them. I always check out the link a person uses on a comment and the link they tie their name to. If the comment is useless like Abhinav describes, I delete it. If the links are bad, I also delete the comment. Akismet gets most of them, but I get the few that are done manually.
I can keep up now since I only get 30 to 50 comments a week on my blog. The people who get hundreds or thousands have a much harder time.
-Will
Most probably, Will is referring to those irresponsible commentators as manual spammers who generally don’t mean a thing in their comments, or who try to clutter your blog by leaving identical comments to many of your posts to degrade the feel of your blog, intentionally.
@Will,
I too, don’t allow comments containing more than 3 or 4 links as I have noticed that most of the comment caught up in the Akismet $P@M is long lists of herbs/drugs and all that irrelevant sort.
The growing problem of Identity Theft has also lead to the increase in Manual Spam as the spammers misuse the identity of genuine (and most of the times, innocent) people to spam blogs!
@Abhinav I’m sick of the comments pushing prescription drugs. If it’s for something positive like drug rehab or alcohol rehab I have no problem with it. Do you?
Yes, because my blog isn’t about rehabilitation or drug prescriptions
You bring up a lot of valid points. Right now I have my blogs set to moderate any comment from a first time commentator containing any amount of links. If there are no links, (and isn’t caught by Akismet) then it goes right up.
am against comment moderation, It discourage coomentator in some way, you can always edit or delete a comment as a site administartor if you don’t like it to be publish. You should be ready to face any kinda comment thrown by anyone, moderation never ment to avoid SPAM comment there is aksmit for that.
I do not moderate comments on my blog, but I do check them daily for spam. I feel that if someone has something to say about your post, then they should be allowed to voice their opinion. I do use the Askimet plug in for Wordpress that takes care of most the spam.
My Akismet and a lot other plugins are acting crazy after I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.3. I never really wanted to upgrade, but don’t know what came to my mind and I did it at once!
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment.
I am still using 2.3 without a problem, I did try to go to 2.3.3, but I had alot of issues with the plug-ins so I uninstalled the update and all works great.
I am missing my 2.3.1 installation
I used to have an unmoderated comments section in my personal blog. But when there are commenters (always hiding behind anonymity) who, instead of contributing to the discussion, would always resort to abusive speech or degrading people, I think I’ve had enough. I don’t think having comments moderation will discourage people from commenting. Those who’re genuinely interested in contributing to the discussion are not discouraged by this, as I know bloggers who still frequent sites that have installed moderation. It is, I think, a form of protection some bloggers need, especially those who are often targets of people who’d rather use ad hominem arguments than presenting their arguments for or against the topics being discussed.
I do not enable comment moderation on my blog because I’m lazy. I just installed akismet and spam karma.. although once in a while, I check the spam log to see if there are legitimate comments that got caught.
those are some good points on not moderate your comments. thanks for blogging about this.
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There are actually a few different ones out there. I have been giving this software a go and see how it pans out.
You have a great site and i return to it ever now and then as i find the time.
Comment moderation is defiantly needed these days with the amount of spam around
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You are giving many valid points about not holding the comments in the queue BUT the spammers are getting better and better every day.
No matter what plug in you install against them, they get you any ways.
who try to clutter your blog by leaving identical comments to many of your posts to degrade the feel of your blog, intentionally.