Do you moderate comments? (before)

[Piratejon]

I was asking people in the "showing off" thread about whether they enjoyed my blog: content, layout etc. I did get a reply mentioning my comment moderation (Comment author must have a previously approved comment). This was followed up by another reply with somebody questioning this, stating that they had received feedback like this before.

What do you think about comment moderation?

[Scribnia]

Akismet does a pretty good job of stopping spam to my blog.

It takes a lot for me to delete a comment. I welcome people who disagree, and even I'll even leave some "troll-type" comments there. You have to be pretty damn offensive for me to delete your comment.

If your'e completely off topic I delete those too.

Moderating is fine if you have the time to sit there and approve comments. I think it's very detrimental to the conversation though.

[Melody]

I moderate comments. My blog is all about the comments. I started it with the intent to create a place like a "community". A comment author must be approved first, and I even go back and look to make sure that people aren't attacking each other in the comments. Thankfully, I tend to have a group of commenters that are quite nice to each other.

[QuirkyJessi]

I really, really dislike when blogs have on comment moderation like that.....unless there's a really good reason for it (like some people who've been drastically attacked in the past and now they're posting something somewhat controversial and want to be able to filter out major attacks before they're publicly published). Otherwise, I have no idea when my comment will actually be published and how many other comments before mine that weren't published yet either. Sometimes I'll go back to a post and realize that there were 40 other comments left before mine but I couldn't see them, so I ended up saying something exactly like 20 other people. It pretty much puts an end to possible conversation, too, if the comment moderation isn't done frequently/quickly, because we can't read each others' comments and comment on those, too.

[Nathan]

The way I figure if it is spam I can always remove it later. I usually remove spammy messages from my blogs within a few hours, and most don't make it through Blogger's irritating comment system, which doesn't work very well for bots.

[chuckles]

I find there's not fun when all the comments has to be moderated first... Also I don't get a lot of comments so I appreciate everything I get

Having said that, I can delete comments if they're nasty...

[carfor12]

I recently put reCaptcha on my blog because I was getting a lot of spam messages (somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90 every two days). I did not want to be sifting through all of these to get to the real comments. I like when people comment and if they want to critize something on my blog and only ask that they do it constructively. I can handle that.

[Jessemn]

Originally Posted by carfor12

I recently put reCaptcha on my blog because I was getting a lot of spam messages (somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90 every two days). I did not want to be sifting through all of these to get to the real comments. I like when people comment and if they want to critize something on my blog and only ask that they do it constructively. I can handle that.

Completely agree. I've found reCaptcha when combined with Askimet is helpful. Sadly, I don't think we will ever be able to completely rely on plugins to do our moderation work.

[QuirkyJessi]

^ Yep. And I'd much rather jump through the captcha hoops (although they're sometimes really hard to read and/or annoying) than to have the comments moderated before posting.

[Melody]

Since I only have to approve an email address once, and most of my comments are repeat visitors, it's not too bad. I really work so hard to quickly approve comments. All day, I've got my phone with me, and I've approved comments sitting in a restaurant before, out and about ... I only feel sorry for those people who live a comment as I'm sleeping! So far it really hasn't been too bad.

@QuirkyJessi - I think you've left one comment on my blog before, and it wasn't too bad. Usually I get to comments pretty fast.