Blog comment luncheon meat

Or spam spam spam spam, as the famous Monty Python song goes.

Most blogs have comment facilities, which you can optionally turn on or off as the blog administrator.  When you’re mulling this option over you usually have two things on your mind, the gravity of each depending on you being a optimist :

1) someone might say something interesting and profound or give me kudos for my excellent prose

..or a pessimist :

2) I’m gonna get spammed to Hades and back.

Being a moderator or admin can sometimes drive you crazy if you have the comments option turned on.  You’ll receive a constant stream of emails from you blogging system, alerting you to a “new comment”.  The majority of which you’ll want to delete immediately, which wastes two minutes of your life – the pessimists will undoubtedly be cleaning down their campervan in preperation for the big trip by the end of the first week (see option 2).

Some folks get around the hassle of comment moderation by automatically allowing comments and relying on the machinery to pluck out the bad ones.  We tend to advise against this, because in doing so you’re really not helping.  For instance, I received a comment to morate this morning which started with the line :

“Can I just say what a relief to discover somebody who definitely knows what theyre talking about on a internet.”

Now, the intesting thing about this comment is that it’s written in English (almost), so the automatic spam filters will think it’s perfectly ok to allow it – my old English teacher clearly didn’t write the filter code.

An amusing game to play is to cut/paste the first line of text into google to see if anybody else received this glowing review :

Google says yes

Sure enough, 202 blogs are currently listed.

So, what’s the point of this comment?  Well, it’s purpose is simply to deliver the link which is provided as part of the comment and publish it on your blog.  Most of the blog platforms allow this, and usually it’s a good thing because it helps bloggers promote each other.

We could remove this feature, but that would be sad for those who make sensible commentary and deserve the link as a token of thanks.

Anyway, this post grew a little longer than I’d first indended, sorry about that, hopefully it does illustrate the importance of that initial decision when setting up your blog, to allow comments or not.  If you do, you will have to make time to moderate comments because there’s a growing percentage of individuals and businesses who are keen to waste your time.  If you don’t, then you lose a very good peer (and wider community) review facility.