A blog friend of mine recently had to switch to pre-mod on her blog because of an ugly smelly troll who started bothering her, and I quite understood the reasoning behind that. But I’ve come across several other people whose blogs have this set up and I’ve wondered if they’d had problems in the past or were just being extra careful or … ?
The only problem that I have with pre-mod is that you usually don’t get to see what other people have said before you (because their comments are also awaiting moderation) and for me this kind of takes something away from the whole blogging experience, interrupts the flow or something. I often find the comments (and banter between commenters) just as entertaining as the post itself. Also, when you are “commenting blind” there is the risk of writing something that seriously jars with what others have been saying, or you can inadvertently put your foot in it, depending on what was said just before you.
So, two questions.
- If you moderate comments on your blog before publishing them … why have you chosen to do this?
- How do you feel about commenting on blogs that hold all comments for moderation?
~ image from 3gatti ~
casa azahar 
I don’t moderate but I can understand why some people do – I try to comment as usual but do feel as though I am flying blind.
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I don’t like comment moderation, although I have some blog-friends who use it. I don’t feel the need to control incoming comments. Occasionally I’ll get a spammer and I delete those, but I’m not concerned with comments that disagree with me nor with comments that are rude. But then again, I’ve never had an ugly smelly troll either.
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I only had to use moderation on the blog I was running for our UU Fellowship. That was because there was some crazy ex-Unitarian who would leave threatening messages on all the postings. Even that was only temporary.
Of course, there are some blogs which never remove crank postings. I recall one where you had to wade through posting after posting my this crazed woman who took exception to mock cartoons based on the “Love Is…” cartoons. She would rant and threaten and stalk other users.
Oddly enough, it turned out that she was that woman who was arrested after going bonkers on a flight from London to Washington.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,208943,00.html
I kid you not…
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I don’t like it, but I do use it on a couple of my blogs where some of the readers are hypersensitive. To be responsible, you have to check it at least twice a day, and that’s a bit of a burden, frankly, when I have all these other things to do. WP.com makes it relatively easy, but it’s not effortless. And it definitely stifles discussion; it prevents people from posting about 75% of the time, when the would do it otherwise. This is an estimate comparing my comment rates across all the blogs.
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I moderate all comments. When I didn’t moderate comments, I got spammers, and to me that interrupts the flow of conversation in a blog. And most of the blogs to which I subscribe require at least a first-time registration. Several of them are moderated. If I’m interested in the topic, I’ll take the time to leave a comment, whether or not I have to register and even if the blog is moderated.
I’ve just had to add an extra layer of moderation to my blog–no anonymous comments will be allowed. Users will have to have an OpenID or other known ID and have to sign in.
I did this for two reasons. First, anonymous comments make it difficult to ‘respond’ back. You don’t know anything about who you’re talking to–it’s the blogging equivalent of yelling “Hey, you!” Second, I really feel that if you’ve got something to say in comment to another’s thoughts on a blog, you should have the intestinal fortitude to put your name on it. I don’t blog about state secrets or industrial espionage. If you need to hide behind anonymity to comment on the subjects in my blog: food, dogs, camping, living with cancer–then you need a little assertiveness reinforcement. My contribution to that is ‘no anonymous comments.’ 🙂
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“To be responsible, you have to check it at least twice a day”
That’s a good point, Rain. But I sometimes wait days (checking back again, and again) to see if the comments have been posted. It gets very frustrating.
“When I didn’t moderate comments, I got spammers”
Hmmm, maybe you should switch over to WordPress.com, Gaelen. Great anti-spam system here, and without all that having to choose your ID each time and then write in the anti-spam letters … that gets really tedious. Here, if you aren’t signed in on WP, you can just write your info in the form once and save it for all future visits.
So maybe once every few months a spammer will get through here. No big deal. And I don’t get many “anonymous” comments. Almost all of the people who comment here and don’t link back to an online ID are friends of mine who don’t blog or have a website. Surprising but true! They still exist.
I can understand first time moderation, even though I don’t bother with that on any of my blogs. I love getting comments and like to make the process as easy as possible.
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I prefer not to mod comments, but I can understand why people do it – some blogs attract the trolls. I also prefer to comment on blogs that don’t pre-mod, as you mentioned in your posting it’s just so much more “authentic” to see my comment automatically post.
To me it seems that unless you have a very busy blog, then you don’t really need to pre-mod comments – you can always delete obvious poop-disturbers and spam as needed. On the other hand, if you have a busy blog, how much time do you want to spend approving comments? Seems rather like a waste of time to me….or a catch-22 situation. Or maybe I’m missing something.
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Nobody ever comments on my blogs anyway. This could be because I’ve given up posting there myself. Must get back to it. (My name here links back to h2g2 instead. I’m far more active there than I am on my own blogs.)
Pre-moderation doesn’t put me off.
TRiG.
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I’ve railed against neo-nazis, posted about racist attacks on foreigners in Germany, written about a Jewish cemetery in a small town in southwestern Germany, and each time attracted the scum of the earth to my blog – vile, hateful creatures who saw fit to rip apart me what I wrote and lay their twisted filth out for all to see.
Or so they thought.
Thanks to comment moderation, their trash stays where it belongs – festering within their feeble minds, rotting them from the inside.
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The couple of times I’ve attracted crapola, I’ve just closed comments on those posts, and that was that. I am sort of put-off by continual comment moderation. I don’t understand, for instance, why What Not to Crochet moderates all comments. Especially when they are posting things that definitely look like crocheted vaginas.
I like to answer comments, and will sometimes answer them by email from my phone. Comments that need moderation are difficult to do from there.
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Yebbut, you don’t have comment moderation on your blog, ian. 😕
Bloggers who answer their commenters is one thing that keeps me going back to them, Silverstar. Does the google phone have a WordPress app? There’s one for the iPhone that takes you to your dashboard, with shortcuts for posting, editing, etc.
Answering comments with an email (if not specifically about something personal) somehow makes me feel like the writer didn’t want to be seen “talking to me in public”. I also breaks any conversational flow happening within the comments.
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why is my message still saying saying waiting for moderations
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Actually, a lot of blogs are set up to put the first comment from each person in a moderation queue. If that first comment is approved, all subsequent comments will go through immediately. I think that’s now the default on WordPress.
Incidentally, the one thing Blogger does better than WP is accepting OpenID login by default. I’ve found a couple of WP plugins which add OpenID functionality, but one doesn’t work with the latest version of WP and the other leaks information to a third party, which goes against the whole point of hosting your own blog. Maybe I’ll read the OpenID spec again and write my own plugin. It would be good practice for me.
TRiG.
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Why hello again! 🙂
Yes, the default on WP is to have the first comment approved, but that is easily changed.
Why do you need/want Open ID on your WP blog? I find it annoying on Blogger as half the time it refuses to recognise my ID.
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