Thursday, April 30, 2009

Clarification on Moderating Comments

A commenter writes ".....with Mark running nanny patrol with comments...."

Let me clarify:

Carpe Diem has been subject to several major spam attacks recently, where somebody posts comments with advertising links on hundreds of older posts at a time. On several occasions in the last few weeks, I had to spend the first 30 minutes of the day removing all of the spam comments. Therefore, I changed the Blogger comment setting to allow me to moderate comments on any post older than 5 days, since most of the spam attacks were on older posts. That seemed to take care of the spam attacks for now, and I just changed the moderation to 10 days for now, to allow for some ongoing, unmoderated discussion that sometimes takes place on popular posts.

So I wasn't intending to be running nanny patrol with comments, but was forced into that situation because of several major spam attacks. I'll fine-tune this as necessary, and have only rejected comments with advertising during the forced "nanny patrol" period. Comments within 10 days of a post are currently not moderated at all.

7 Comments:

At 4/30/2009 2:47 PM, Blogger fboness said...

Don't worry about the whiners.

 
At 4/30/2009 3:06 PM, Blogger bob wright said...

fboness +1

 
At 4/30/2009 4:44 PM, Blogger ExtremeHobo said...

Oh wow, are we keeping score?

 
At 4/30/2009 7:46 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mark--
I appreciate all your work, even the nanny stuff.:)

 
At 4/30/2009 11:02 PM, Blogger bobble said...

i often disagree with prof perry, but i respect him for allowing free discussion in the comments section.

 
At 5/01/2009 12:14 AM, Blogger Bloggin' Brewskie said...

Everyone,

I was the one who made the comment. I have no problem with comment moderation and respect the blogger's choice in enforcing it. There's plenty of other bloggers who use the same function; they use it to ensure readers do not run amok in discussion or, as Mark does, to control unwarranted spam. Some bloggers abuse the function rapaciously, to control or weed out feedback, but this blog indicates no excoriation of freedom of speech.

The comment was made at the tail-end of a rather long discussion with another reader - one that wasn't going anywhere, one most would care not to monitor. Though the statement was actually intended as a joke, and to convey to the other reader it was time to hang-up, it's understood better judgment should have been executed with choosing proper words.

Mark, I realize the error in judgment, and I do apologize.

 
At 5/02/2009 1:36 AM, Blogger Klockarman said...

Mark,

Based upon what I've read in this post about your problem with spam comments, I think it's time for you to say good-bye to Blogger, and get your own domain and hosting. Then you can download Wordpress, which is a far superior blogging platform anyway. Of particular interest to you is that Wordpress will automagically put all of the spam comments in a spam folder that you can peruse at your leisure (or you can just ignore it).

I was on Blogger for about a year, and then recently took the plunge, bought my own domain ($8) and hosting ($60/yr.) It's a small price to pay for complete control of your blog, and you're no longer at the mercy of Blogger.

Also, then you'd really own your blog. With Blogger, you don't.

 

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