Blog moderation

For those that either have blogs or oversee others...

First question: How fast do comments from readers make it onto the blog? Do they go into a queue to be manually approved by the blog administrator, or do they go up right away and removed later if it contains offensive material?

Second question: Where do you draw the line between an OK comment and one that has to be deleted, in terms of language?

My own answers...

1) We've received complaints that comments take too long to get posted -- on busy days, it can take a couple hours, and a comment can sit in a queue 24 hours on the writer's off day. At the same time, I don't think anybody could stomach hate speech and the like under our banner for a given amount of time.

2) The only real rules we have are no obscenities and no outrageous, potentially libelous claims (So-and-so showed up to work drunk, beats his kids, etc.). But the gray areas are starting to get tricky, as far as whether "douchebag" is appropriate, and some words tend to get banned in one blog but not another.

 

We make people register and allow their comments to go directly to the site. If there's a particularly heated topic you monitor it. On mine, I'd remove a comment for a curse word and talk to the poster about putting it back in without the curse word. If it becomes threatening and more curse words you remove 'em. If it continues you ban 'em.

Haven't had a lot of problems believe it or not.

 

We keep users, who have to register, in a sandbox for their first handful of comments. If they don't cause problems, their future posts can go live immediately.

We also can filter out posts or hold them for moderation if they contain problem words.

WordPress blog software has these functions available.

I've seen blogs that go live unmoderated and without registration. Bad news if you ask me.

 

mine doesn't allow anonymous posting. anonymous posting can be bad. i'm pretty liberal with what goes up. if i had to get clearance (as i know others on our network do) i'd be doing nothing but that. i keep a loose eye on mine, but i've gotten as many as 544 comments in a night, so it's not as if i can keep up with all of those and still do my gamer and notes

(not to be a total douche, i just know the 544 number because it was an all-time high last night and i was pretty amazed by it)