a glimpse into how comments are moderated
When you have a blog and you have the comments function on, or open for that matter, it cannot be helped that sometimes you get spam or insulting comments from different visitors, most of them you probably don’t even know. Some might even be personal insults or a kind of feedback that you never really expected. Something akin to flamebaits in mailing list flamewars.
Why do people moderate comments anyway?
Spam management
Spam comments on blogs is quite unsightly. Especially if it’s all about poker, some kind of sports betting, medicine to enhance different body parts (and sometimes you might not even have those particular body parts) and other material that is unrelated to your blog, especially your blog entry.
Verification
Some would rather verify the commenter’s existence. That is why sometimes there are a lot ofrequired fields like blog, email address, etc. Establishing commenters’ identities is sometimes an essential task. As they say, on the Internet, no one knows who you really are. But in any case, there are people who would like to know your online credibility.
Grammar check
Some might think that those who do that are of the Type A personality. But of course, it varies from one blogger to another. After all, it is their blog.
Security purposes, etc.
There might be some comments that contain information which might be too confidential. If that is the case, there is a tendency to approve the comments but they will not necessarily appear on the blog. Security is an important matter, after all.
These are just some of the reasons for moderating blog comments. It is on a case to case basis why people turn the comments function off or moderate. In case you decide to have some kind of policy about it on your blog, might as well have that clearly written on your sidebar or on your profile page.
Originally posted on July 15, 2006 @ 12:36 am
