Thoughts on moderating comments?

Published by in blogs on July 5th, 2007

I’m curious what others’ current views are on moderating comments on a professional learning blog like this one. Until yesterday, I have not had comment moderation turned on, but for some reason an offensive comment and link got through Akismet and the other anti-blog spam plugins I had activated. This was more troubling than it might have been in the past, since I added a WordPress widget to my blog yesterday showing current comments in the left sidebar. For some time, I have noticed that even when I delete a comment from my blog (mark it as spam) which should not be published, it remains in my blog’s RSS comment feed. I hypothesize this might be due to some incompatibilities with WordPress plugins I’m using or have used in the past, but I’m not sure. It seems like as soon as a comment is deleted from a WordPress blog, it should also be deleted from the RSS feed, but that hasn’t been the case with me for several months.

Currently, these are the WordPress plugins I’m using. (I’ve deactivated others because one or more were evidently not playing well with WordPress 2.2, and doing things like making me unable to delete unwanted pages and posts.)

With recent comments immediately viewable in the left sidebar of my blog, it certainly makes them more visible and makes it therefore more “dangerous” (potentially) to leave moderation off. I generally check comments pretty regularly during the day, and my desire has been to leave off moderation to enable to the greatest degree possible the ability of people to have a conversation here on my blog, where I’m not having to stand in the way of the dialog.

At times in the past when I’ve been updating WordPress or experimenting with different plugins to curb comment spam, I’ve been shocked by the quantity of blog spam that would proliferate on my blog if it wasn’t adequately protected (I could say I’ve been shocked by the content of blog spam, but sadly blog comment spam looks a lot like email spam these days so I’m not sure “shocked” is entirely accurate. There’s lots of offensive as well as time-wasting text and links flying around the web these days.) For awhile I used the Math Comment Spam Protection for basic captcha functionality, but the use of the Simple Trackback Validation (which I now don’t have enabled) as well as the other anti-blog spam plugins seemed to work pretty well. I’d like to use another captcha plugins, but I’m not sure which one is best and I haven’t experimented with others.

What do you think about having moderation on or off on a professional learning blog like this one? For teacher classroom blogs, I always recommend post and comment moderation. I’m hesitant to enable moderation here, but I have (at least temporarily) because of yesterday’s rogue offensive comment.

BTW, thanks to Tim Stahmer for his comment letting me know Ecto is not currently compatible with WordPress 2.2. As a result, I’m writing my first offline blog post using Mars Edit. So far, so good!

Technorati Tags:
, , ,

On this day..

8 Comments »
  • http://www.darcynorman.net D’Arcy Norman

    I’m using Spam Karma 2 – it takes a few days to “teach” it, but after that it’s pretty rock solid. I avoid Captcha like the evil plague that it is. Akismet is OK, but failed far too often for my liking.

    I leave comment posting open, and SK2 picks up questionable ones automagically and pushes them to moderation for me.

    Here’s my full plugin colophon, if it comes in handy:
    http://www.darcynorman.net/about/colophon

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    I used Spam Karma 2 for at least 2 years also, but discontinued using it about 6 months ago because I thought it wasn’t preventing enough spam comments from coming in the door. I may go back to it. Thanks so much for sharing the link to your “colophon,” I hadn’t heard that term before. Yes, that is VERY helpful!

  • http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog Mathew

    I use SpamBam (I’ve never been able to get Askimet to work) and it has worked for me.

  • http://www.downes.ca Stephen Downes

    I do not use moderation or captcha either on my own website or on Blogger.

    I have my own spam filter on my own website that’s pretty sensitive (it checks not just for phrases but also for sense – this in response to the garbage spam that was being thrown at websites). I have the advantage that my configuration is unique, so spammers have to write code specifically for me. Sadly, they do. So I monitor my comment threads every day and remove the stuff that gets through.

    Same thing with Blogger. If spam gets through, I simply remove it.

    I don’t obsess over it. If it gets through, it gets through. I would certainly never start moderating or worse to prevent the possibility of a rogue comment getting through. That’s overkill. My readers are tough; they can handle the occasional bad word if they know keep the site in generally good order.

  • http://www.lutherantech.com Dave

    I have no problem with comment moderation. It is your blog and anything that has no value to the discussion is simply noise that the rest of us won’t have to deal with. One can build credibility by allowing those comments that legitimately question the assumptions and conclusions found in posts. Similarly, one will lose credibility if moderation were simply to be used as a censor for comments not liked by the poster. All the evidence I have indicates that you would act as the former example rather than the latter, so I wouldn’t have any issue with comment moderation under that circumstance.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    Thanks for these comments and this input. I’ve removed the moderation setting and will continue to monitor, I think that is probably the best approach as Stephen suggests. I’m reminded of some things Clarence Fisher said last year in a podcast interview with Dean Shareski about his classroom blogging culture evolving to the point where he had to “get out of the way.” I don’t want to be in the way as a comment moderator and as long as there is just an occasional/rare comment that gets through that needs to be edited (most often because it is an advertisement for something) then that seems a small price to pay for more free-flowing discussion.

  • http://www.learningismessy.com/blog Brian Crosby

    Wes, you might check out the new vwesion of Flock as an edit tool : http://www.flock.com/

    Brian

  • http://www.bobsprankle.com Bob Sprankle

    Thanks for this post, Wes! I too have had some spam sneaking past my Spam Karma… thought it was just a problem with my blog. I’ll be trying some of the solutions mentioned here and following this conversation.

    Bob

© Creative Commons License