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Sunday, August 01, 2010

Looking for Comment Moderation Suggestions

I'm looking for a comment moderation tool for the blog. I want to be able to register people and let the registered ones' comments show up immediately. For years I've run The Scratching Post without comment moderation, but I've finally had enough of the sales spam and the ravings of the mentally ill polluting the site. I really enjoyed the excellent dialog I had recently with some interested atheists and I felt bad that their effort had to wait for me to publish it. As Captain Smee would say, that wasn't good form.

If you've got a comment system to suggest, I'd love to hear about it.

5 comments:

  1. "As Captain Smee would say, that wasn't good form."

    By an amusing coincidence, I heard Smee say that very thing not five minutes before I stopped by and read this post - the girls are watching Peter Pan.

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  2. The span posts have really gotten bad the last few months. I just gave up and turned on content moderation, but something that allows followers to post immediately would be nice.

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  3. Tim - What a coincidence! Remembering watching that with my kids made me smile. Thanks.

    Kelly - I wonder if you could make people contributors to the blog, but only give them commenting priveleges. You can do that in Movable Type.

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  4. And, addressing your actual question: I don't know if it can be used on your blogging platform, but in WordPress the "Akismet" filter is very good. I don't remember the last time it let a spam comment get through, and its rate of false positives is miniscule: the four or five times that there was something that I thought it had mistakenly tagged as spam, on further investigation it turned out that I was wrong, and Akismet was correct. And this is out of the approximately 12,000 spam comments it has filtered out for me so far.

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  5. Very late....
    I have fairly good luck with disabling annon comments, enabling open ID and removing word verification. (I turned on word ver. while I was gone-- seemed to make those new, random chineese spammers get *worse.*)

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