What is Comment Moderation?
Comment moderation is a feature offered by most of the blogging platforms that allows you to prevent comments from appearing on your site without your express approval.
What do many bloggers think?
I know many bloggers around (I mean bloggers…) who almost consider enabling comment moderation, a principle. I talked to a few of such people and collected the reasons they give for enabling comment moderation.
- To prevent Comment-Spam
- To prevent displaying abusive comments
- To control the comments that speak against the idea presented in their posts
I had stumbled upon a blog a few days ago that emphasized that you should enable comment-moderation on your blog and make it a habit to regularly approve the comments from the moderation queue.
What do I think?
- I agree that comment moderation helps a lot in filtering out comment spam. Comment Spam is indeed a hated devil!
- I also agree that you can dis-approve abusive comments and get rid of them. Abusing is not one of the blogger-traits. Its really important that the commentator should mind his tongue and tone while commenting. By abusing, you’ll never be defaming the blog-author but only bringing yourself a bad name, from the supporting readership that may include people/bloggers you know well. Certainly not a healthy thing to do.
- I disagree that you should moderate the comments to filter out and dis-approve those comments that speak against the idea presented in your post. If you practice this, then your blog is not a blog but a personal website.
The essence of blogging is lost in one-way communication. Even if you believe that you are God, always bear in mind that there are atheists who don’t believe you. Also, the objective of criticism in comments at your blog is just getting into a discussion and extracting an optima out of it & not degrading you. Learn How to Respond to the Comments on your Blog effectively and try to take them as positively as you can.
But the point is,
Should You Enable Comment Moderation on Your Blog?
I have jotted down 4 main reasons why (I think) comment moderation should not be enabled on your blog:
- Everyone knows how to use Delete function. If you monitor your blog regularly for new comments and/or are notified about new comments on your blog via email, then you should be able to remove irresponsible spammy comments in a little time from when they are posted.
- If you approve comments from the moderation queue once or twice in a day, then its likely that during the time when the comments are held in moderation queue your visitors might miss a discussion that could have otherwise sparked up from an interesting idea or a form of criticism posted in a comment.
- You can, by mistake, delete or dis-approve a genuine comment while bulk-moderating. And a commentator may form a negative impression by this unintended gesture. Instead, you can delete the abusive or irresponsible comments when they are displayed on your blog. The visitors who might have seen such comments on your blog will appreciate not seeing that content later on.
- Only those bloggers use comment moderation to dis-approve comments that speak against the idea conveyed in their posts, who lack originality and fear getting exposed.
What do you think about this matter: Comment Moderation? Do you use comment moderation for holding up comments till you manually approve them or let all the comments appear on your blog but monitor them regularly and keep cleaning them up as soon as you spot a blot! Share your views, opinions and experiences with the rest of us reading this. Feel free to drop a comment and subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated with the latest posts at Inspirit.