On one of my WordPress-powered blogs I use first-time comment moderation (if you're a first-time commenter your comment goes in moderation - if you've been there before it lets you post your comments directly). It's a convenient way of weeding out spam as well as keeping out anything that violates the site's comments policy (which mainly asks abusive commenters to think twice before posting).
There's a downside to this, however - the delay in moderating comments means that new readers coming in don't see the comments that are stuck in moderation and therefore there is less of a chance for a genuine conversation to develop in the comments section of the blog. I think moderation could account of losing around half of the comments an article would normally get, even if you take out the negative comments.
I've turned off comment moderation this morning as an experiment for this weekend - and I'll report back in this thread on whether comments actually increase as a result.
What about you? Do you moderate your comments? Why (or why not)?
Comments? What are
Comments? What are they?
Seriously, I don't have any issues at all with spam comments on my blogs (and they're Blogger ones, no less). I think the most restrictive thing I have implemented are captchas.
On the other hand, I don't get actual comments either so it is probably more a function of the level of traffic rather than any system I use.
Captchas can be quite
Captchas can be quite annoying, agreed.
well, weekend without
well, weekend without comment moderation, and the sky didnt fall down, although (i'd like to think) that comments did increase slightly.
You can easily spend 5-10 minutes a day (or better yet, hire someone) to cull the comments instead of 30 mins each day just moderating comments
Putting comments on a
Putting comments on a moderation queue is a sign of low professionalism.
When my comment is moderated I usually don't go back for commenting.
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