What Is Your Level Of Comment Moderation?

September 14, 2007 | Blogging Basics, Wordpress

Recently, I’ve seen quite a few bloggers write about how they are now using comment moderation on their blogs as a method to deter spam. Personally, I’ve always used some level of comment moderation, along with other tools, to prevent comment spam on this blog. My thought is that as long as I keep spam and irrelevant comments out of the blog, my readers will be willing to put up with a bit of moderation lag time.

However, after reading some of these bloggers make a big deal out it, and seemingly inconvenience their readers, I thought it might be a good idea to discuss some of the comment moderation options available, my comment moderation policy, and get some feedback from you.

Comment Moderation Options in WordPress

Most of these, or similar, options are available with every blogging platform I know of, but since I use WordPress we will use it as an example. Also, there are many other options and plugins that deal with comment moderation, but I am going to stick with what comes with WordPress by default. You can find these options by navigating to “Options” -> “Discussion” in your WordPress admin.

An administrator must always approve the comment

This option requires the blog owner to individually approve every comment and is a great way to ensure that absolutely no spam gets through. However, it can also be very time consuming, especially if you get a lot of comments.

Comment author must fill out name and e-mail

This option requires every commenter to fill in their name and email. It’s nice to know who is leaving comments on your blog, but this option does not guarantee the comment authors are filling in their real information.

Comment author must have a previously approved comment

This option requires the blog owner to approve the first comment from a user and allows each subsequent comment to go through unmoderated. The biggest drawback of this option (and the first one) is that a users first comment is not immediately available.

Number of links in comment

This option allows you to specify the number of links in a comment that will trigger moderation. For example if you have this set to 2 and someone leaves a comment with 2 or more links it will automatically be thrown in to the moderation queue.

Word in comment matches one from a predefined list

This option allows you to specify a list of words will trigger moderation. For example if you had the word “duck” in your list, any time someone used the word “duck” in a comment, that comment would be automatically held in the moderation queue for approval.

My Comment Moderation Policy

As I said before, I’ve always used some level comment moderation. Currently I require all commenter’s to specify a name and email address, have a previously approved comment and any comment with 2 or more links will be automatically sent to moderation.

I see a number of blogs that have a similar policy and to me it seems like a good, middle of the road, compromise between usability, time requirement and spam control.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I know there isn’t an “end all” solution, and it will very from blog to blog, but I will still like to hear your thoughts and opinions. How much comment moderating do you do? Does having your comment moderated annoy you?

10 Useful WordPress Comment Plugins
Beta Testing Intense Debate Comment System
Who Wants Some Link Love?
To Follow or Not To Follow
Do You Have a Widespread or Targeted Approach to Commenting?

If you enjoyed reading Average Joe Blogger why not subscribe to my RSS Feed or get it delivered directly to your email inbox.

7 Responses to “What Is Your Level Of Comment Moderation?”

Steven Snell | September 14th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

I use Akismet first of all. I think it does a pretty good job, although I don’t search through the thousands of spam comments it filters to find legit ones. I don’t require comments to be approved, but sometimes I have to delete one. Only when it’s blatantly an advertisement, and usually it’s for something questionable.
David Zemens | September 14th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

I use Akismet as well and think it’s a great tool — catches 95% of the spam. I also require that a user has a previously approved comment , otherwise their comment requires moderation. The one other feature I find useful is to require moderation for all comments with more than one link in the text. So far, so good…although my blog doesn’t get very much traffic.
Karthik | September 15th, 2007 at 2:01 am

I use the same configuration as yours, and yes, I agree with Steven, Akismet seems to catch all my spam. So far it has a 100% track record (caught 1 out of a total of 1 spam comment!)
Nate (Average Joe Blogger) | September 15th, 2007 at 9:47 am

I also use Akismet and as far as I remember it has 100% success rate. However, I also had a few people who have tried to add spammy comments which, because of the moderation scheme I am using, I was able to delete before they went live.
dcr | September 16th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

I have the same setup as you. I will probably start using the Blacklist soon as well, as I keep getting a lot of spam comments that have the same type of content–enough that I think I could make a Blacklist word or phrase out of.
TenthOfMarch | September 20th, 2007 at 11:16 am

I started off with akismet. It worked really well but was giving false positives result sometimes. One of my readers comments will always be marked as spam no matter how many times I de-spam it (and akismet was supposed to learn that it wasn’t spam after a while). I later sent a message to the support team and they fixed it for me.

Anyway, I dropped akismet and tried a combination of spam karma 2 and bad behavior. It works okay so far. My moderation settings are mostly default. Even people leaving comments the first time will be approved automatically. I don’t like having to manually approve them all the time.
Sydney | September 28th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

On That College Kid, I currently do not have a large spam problem (for now), but on my other domains, I used Akismet, which caught almost everything.

My settings are the default Wordpress choices and they haven’t been abused too much. On my contact form, however, I was getting incredible amounts of spam so I installed C-Forms II and it has a spam question on it, which so far has been working wonders.