How to moderate blogs

Blog comment moderation options

Of course all major blogging systems allow you to turn off comments altogether. If your communications channel is supposed to be one-way, there's no reason for you to read on. If not, there's still a bunch of options:

• Only registered and logged-in users are allowed to comments
• Every comments is kept in the moderation queue until the admin approves it
• The first time a user comments, his posting is kept in the moderation queue. Once approved, his next comment will appear immediately.
• Everybody is allowed to comment freely without any restrictions whatsoever

The option you chose depends on your topics and your intentions. If only registered users are allowed to comment, you will receive a lot less feedback. If anybody is allowed to comment freely, you are bound to receive a lot of spam and some comments you might not want to be visible on your domain. But if spam is your only concern, there are very good solutions.

For which data should I ask?

Usually, commenters have to leave an e-mail address and a nickname - the homepage is optional. But if someone does not want to leave his or her e-mail address, they'll use a fake one anyways. So there's no potential risk in allowing "anonymous" comments, as there is no difference between a blank e-mail field and a fake entry. In this respect you might not want to ask for any information except for the actual comment text, but rather optionally allow undisclosed users to express their opinion.

How to anti-spam

You've probably seen captures: it's the little hard-to-read texts you have to enter in order to prove that you're a human. Or at least a very advanced spam script. These captures help keeping blogs clean, but they are a constant annoyance to human readers. Personally, I think that a math-capture (the user has to enter the answer to a simple mathematical operation) is a far better option, but even that is completely unnecessary these days.

Thanks to services like akismet and advanced plugins like WP-Spamfree you'll hardly ever have trouble with unwanted comments.

Personal sidenote: on my blog I've been using a combination of WP-Spamfree, Akismet and Trackback Validation and I hardly ever have anything in my spam queue - sometimes, a "false positive" (a real comment, falsely recognized as spam) turns up, but it's easy to un-spam those.

Which comments should I allow?

That totally depends on you - most blogger agree though that a simple "great article" with some backlink to the commenters page does not qualify. After all, it's your media kingdom, and you have to decide how open - to spam, to critics, to annoying customers - you want to be. Moderation of blog comments does not simply mean removing or keeping them There's a couple of options:

• Person A posts a topical comment on your article with which you agree - no hard work in here.
• Person B posts the same comment but it includes a link to a highly dubious link-exchange site. That's what SEOs refer to as "bad neighborhood". You might not want to link to this site, but you don't to remove the link either for some reason. Your weapon of choice in that case would be a follow-plugin which enables you to add nofollow to selected comments.
• Person C posts the same comment again, but this time it includes a link to a pornographic page. You don't want to delete the comment altogether, but you don't want your visitors to click on the link, if it's marked as nofollow: so you edit the comment and leave the comment untouched.
• Person D doesn't include a link at all, but a lot of four-letter-words. So you probably might want to use to edit the comment and use some asterisks.

If you simply want to delete the comment, there are also two option: you can either simply delete it, or you can mark the comment as spam and help services like akismet to work even better in the future.

Follow vs. Nofollow

The attribute "nofollow" that can be inserted into link-tags will Google make ignore the said link - it doesn't get indexed and passes no "google juice". Out-of-the-box, WordPress inserts this nofollow argument into all comments links as a means of preventing spam. But sadly, over the past years, this strategy did not minimize spam at all and a lot of bloggers decided that they actually want to kick out the nofollow attribute. "If someone is making the effort of writing a topical comment, they should be rewarded with a backlink" is the basic dofollow idea.

Currently, there's a wide variety of plugins available which help bloggers get rid of the nofollow attribute. Some of them stripe the attribute from the source code in general, some allow for manual choosing of follow/nofollow. If you want to increase your commenting activity, it's a must to turn of the dreaded nofollow.

Give love to your top commenters

As soon as you do have regular commeting activity on your blog, it's an excellent idea to activate a top-commenters plugin: these plugins generate a list of the top users that left comments (e.g. in the last thirty days) which can be shown anywhere on your blog. If you display the list on your front page, there's one reason more for commenters to regularly drop some wise words on your blog. Of course the links in the list have to be nofollow.

Good luck with all your blogging adventures - enjoy interesting discussions and right off spam with ease!