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Do not moderate comments on your blog
When you start a blog, the natural thing is to want to feel that you’re in control of it, and that means controlling what can be posted there. But that’s a mistake. Moderation means that people can’t see their own comments, which is alienating; but more importantly, it means other people can’t see them, which in turn means that all discussion grinds to a halt until such time as you happen to moderate.
What that means is that the site is only really alive when you’re at the keyboard, constantly checking your inbox, so that you notice moderation requests as soon as they come in. It means you’ll never have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding that a discussion has broken out on your blog.
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But what about spam? On a good platform, it’s not a problem. Since we started SV-POW!, 6,539 comments have been posted, and 3,552 spam comments have been automatically detected and help for moderation. My and Matt’s manual moderation of those suspected-spam comments shows that detection has been 99.92% accurate: there have been only three false negatives in five and a half years. There have been 63 false positives, i.e. comments that looked like spam but weren’t. Those were held for moderation, and passed.
So. You don’t need to moderate to filter spam, and you don’t want to moderate to control discussion. Just open it up. (If you’re using a platform with bad spam-filtering, you may have to move. We’re on WordPress.com, and very happy with it, but others platforms may be just as good or better.)
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[Note. This is a re-post of the most important part of Tutorial 18: how to have fruitful discussions in your blog’s comments. I'm posting this bit separately so that I can link to this most important part without the distraction of the other parts.]
2012-10-19 08:02:28
Source: http://svpow.com/2012/10/19/do-not-moderate-comments-on-your-blog/
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