100spins

Have you ever thought that something which you took for granted another person may consider to be of great value? It came to me the other day when I was going through some comments that perhaps there are people out there who are not quite sure how to moderate their comments. How exactly do you decide which comments are deleted or spammed and which ones are good enough to keep? After some thought I decided there would be enough people out there who would be interested in the criteria I use to moderate my comments to warrant me writing a post about it.

Those of you who are regulars know that any comment you leave gets published immediately, as I don’t believe in letting them go to moderation to be approved or denied at a later date. I do this to reward my commentators and because it doesn’t take me that long to delete unworthy comments, especially as most of the hard work has been done by the GASP and Akismet plugins.

Good Comments VS Bad Comments

Standing at the Gates of Hell

In Akismet Hell

Some time ago I wrote a post called Teaching People The Proper Way To Comment and reading that post is your first step on your quest for better comments. I pretty well let all comments through on that post giving them a grade out of ten with a short description of why they got that grade. Don’t worry, even though I accepted all comments I removed the links from comments I would normally have deleted. What I found to be a real hoot was the comments left by people who obviously didn’t read the post. Too bad for them and they probably never knew their score because they never had any intention of coming back, which is why you should delete their comments.

Now that you know how to tell the difference between a good comment and a bad comment you’re ready to learn how I determine which comments survive and which ones get deleted or even worse get sent to spam hell!

Not Following The Comment Policy

My Comment Policy is the first step I use to decide which comment gets the chop and which one is accepted. People who haven’t bothered to read it and make stupid mistakes like using a keyword instead of a name definitely get the chop. If it is a really good comment, one that adds value to the post, I’ll remove the keywords. There’s no point letting a good comment go to waste now is there?

Not Reading The Post

Way too many commentators think they can leave a comment without reading the post. They seem to think they can get a feeling for the post just by reading the heading and maybe even the first couple of sentences. Too bad they usually get it wrong and their comments have nothing to do with the post and so it get’s deleted.

Including Unrelated Links

If it isn’t enough that I have a dofollow blog and reward commentators with both commentluv and keywordluv plugins, there are still morons out there who insist on placing a link in their comment. I wouldn’t mind if the link led to a site that was related to the post itself but they usually have nothing to do with it and simply links to some unrelated site. These comments are sent straight to spam.

Not Enough Content

Commentators are getting pretty smart these days because they know what happens to comments such as ‘Good post’ and so they try to beat the system by leaving simple sentences that add nothing at all to the post, something like this one that I’ve just deleted; “Hey! It seems to be one of the impressive stuff you have shared with us.” Yeah, as if they think inane compliments would guarantee their comment. Nope, I love kicking these comments to the curb.

That’s it! Now you know how I work out which comments I keep, which ones I delete and which ones I send to spam. There is a very good reason why I am so strict with the quality of comments I accept on my blog and why you should be just as stringent with the ones on yours. The last thing a person wants to see after reading a great post is a whole lot of crappy comments. Seeing this tells them that the blogger doesn’t really care much about his blog. I don’t want to give them that impression about my blogs.

Do you follow the same criteria I do? Perhaps you do things differently and if so you would like to share your moderation technique with us.

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011
Previous Post

Saturday Mish Mash To Brighten Your Day

If you're one of my Australian readers you are well into enjoying your weekend and ... Read more

Next Post

Caesar's Palace Moving Statues Come To WassupBlog

Yep, it's time to visit Las Vegas again, the last time being when I told ... Read more

Sharing is CoolShare on Facebook0Share on Google+0Tweet about this on Twitter11Share on LinkedIn3Pin on Pinterest0Share on StumbleUpon0

Tagged with:

Filed under: Blogging Tips

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
http://wassupblog.com/how-to-moderate-your-comments/
wassupblog.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-50
388409
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OK5RYNNXI23UAGVGG2S3TEWP7SQJL7LC
<urn:uuid:67356de4-311f-4233-996f-3f1a1a7a2f93>
2016-12-03T06:45:33Z
70.39.150.235
sha1:6P2ME3BJYHYONHYVHP4EDVDZK5PFIEUG
<urn:uuid:04e04604-3c78-4c28-99d1-2715ed38a839>
http://wassupblog.com/how-to-moderate-your-comments/
length
response
<urn:uuid:3c0f5912-bcb3-4bb1-8aaa-2661c340573a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-31-129-80.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-50
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf