Do you moderate comments on your blog? Whether yes or no, you must have your reasons. Lets start with No.

NO, I DON’T MODERATE COMMENTS ON MY BLOG

Consider the following possible advantages

• Readers feel you are a “Freedom of Speech” type of person and they can likely engage in a conversation
• Readers who engage in a conversation feel free to air out their lungs since they believe you respect their opinions and don’t really care if their thoughts are similar to yours or not
• Since comments are not queued up for moderation, readers who really don’t have much or anything at all can still comment by just following the discussions of other commenters
• Some commenters tend to drop very sensitive or controversial comments which sparks up the discussion and suddenly turns it into an argument, yielding more and more comments.

Consider the following possible disadvantages

• if the discussion turns into an argument, some commenters may use your post as a battling field where they can exchange insults with one another
• Some commenters don’t care about censurable words and will even use God’s name to swear on your post
• Many commenters drop useless meaningless comments like “Great” and “Nice Post” just to get backlinks.
• Manual spammers visit your post and try to twist your comment as much as possible to suit what they want to promote through the comment form

YES, I MODERATE COMMENTS ON MY BLOG

Possible advantages

• Maintain a mature community of readers and commenters since “strict backlink finders” are cut off the deal.
• Keep your post clean by censoring bad words and irritating language
• Easily get rid of manual spam
• Get rid of irrelevant comments (e.g. in old posts)

Possible disadvantages

• Extra workload reading, since you always have to check for unmoderated comments many times a day
• Inconsistent discussion. Discussions on post do not flow steadily since a comment that could set the pace of the next commenter is being held in the moderation queue
• Some potential commenters won’t comment. They would rather stay on the safe side of the fence since they probably don’t know what you consider a good comment.
• Most commenters don’t give their full opinions about your post since they are afraid to go against yours and risk being kicked out.

SPAM, CRITIC AND INTEGRITY

For just a moment, let’s all forget about the numerous advantages and disadvantages of comment freedom and comment moderation.
What are the main reasons for comment moderation?

SPAM: Until your blog matures and starts getting enough spam, you probably won’t know how serious the issue of spam is. Just imagine some crazy robots programmed by someone to automatically post rubbish to you blog. Very aching, right? Is comment moderation the sole solution to this? Captcha is a very common phenomenon on the Internet and I really don’t think there is any system that does not have provision for it to fight against spam. If you have enabled comment moderation on your blog solely because you want to fight spam, why not consider using anti spam instead. I know Captcha doesn’t work in the case of manual spam, you have someone write a few lines of codes for you that can queue up comments for moderation only when the comment has a certain number of links.

CRITIC: Most bloggers are scared of being criticized. In that case, they will like to enable comment moderation so that any negative comment can be gotten rid of. How do you learn and grow when you are afraid of people criticizing you. In most cases, those who criticize are better friends than those who flatter you. I admire Sangeeta very much. She is a very great friend of mine and stood beside me all the way when I was building The World Ahead. She openly criticized any ideas I posted which were contrary to hers or public opinions. That enabled me write better since I was always conscious of her critics.

INTEGRITY: A majority of bloggers can’t just bare it when they find commenters quarreling and exchanging insults, or using immoral language and swearing on comments. This deeply degrades the value of a post or blog. This can still be well taken care of without comment moderation, although it is very risky. I will personally allow them post the rubbish, but I make sure i check as frequent as possible and delete them. When commenters get to know that you always delete inappropriate material, be sure that they will give up on it (comment immorality). If you really want to go techy on this one too, someone can write a few lines of code that will identify bad words in comments and censor them.

My Personal Opinion

Moderating comments on your blog is good if you are “always” online to moderate the comments in less than an hour after they are published. If not, I don’t think it is worth the trouble!!!

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