On making comment moderation not suck
Today, I had comments moderated twice. I don’t really mind that: if you can’t get spam-free any better way, moderation and keeping it to yourself beats either letting them through, or giving up and just doing without comments. However, neither time was a particularly polished experience.
On one, my comment included a link that would help the post author out. I’m pretty sure it was moderated, either because of that link or because the author chooses to moderate all comments. I’m only pretty sure, because it’s a WordPress weblog, and at least as of that version (and every one where I’ve ever been moderated) WordPress doesn’t think you need to know that your comment was moderated: you just go right back to the page where you posted, as though submitting the comment failed. Do I need to file a bug on that, or do you already have one? That’s incredibly hostile to casual commenters, especially if all their experience has been with things that either don’t moderate, or have a “comment moderated” page.
On the other, running Movable Type, I submitted my comment, and only then was told that if I had a time machine, I could go back in time and sign in to TypeKey, and escape moderation. The standard If you have a TypeKey identity, you can sign in to use it here.
message didn’t exactly get that across to me, like an easily-automated Comments are moderated unless you sign in with TypeKey
message would have. Do I need to file a bug on that, assuming either of the places I could are still actually active? Or, am I missing something, and announcing that TypeKey is moderation-free, especially in a single standard phrase, would be too spammable?
Good tips. I stupidly haven’t thought about making sure commenters understand that if the comment doesn’t show immediately its thanks to moderation. A simple note above the comment box or next to the submit button should do.
Seems silly that this needs to pointed out. We’re obviously not all on the ball with things like this.
Partly, it’s a cross-cultural thing: at least for techies, you’ll inevitably read more people using your blogging program than not: that person with the great theme? better subscribe, to keep up on updates; those three people with cool plugins? you’ll want to subscribe, to see what they do next. You wind up used to silly little broken things (like the fact that right now I’m looking at an unchecked ”Remember info?” box, even though it’s remembered, which I should fix) because your blog does it, and everyone else’s does it, and that’s just how it is. Unfortunately, most of the MT users I read are either crabby bastards who refuse to include TypeKey on principle, or successful anti-spam coders, or both, so I keep getting surprised by both camps, even though the ”moderate non-TypeKey” thing is straight out of Six Apart’s guide to fighting comment spam. Usually, it’s far enough apart that I shrug it off, but this time the one-two was close enough to keep me annoyed long enough to write a post.
I think the latest version of wordpress - 1.5 now has the feature you request.
I had the interesting experience of my own blog moderating one of my own comments. I haven’t had time to investigate why (there were no links), but it clearly stated that my comment had been moderated.
Try it at http://www.dellah.com/orient/2005/03/04/new-doctor-who-series with a couple or three links.
Phil: You’re really good with indirect guilt trips, you know that? So fine… I’m working on adding a visible ”posting policy” section to my forms.
Although given that there are something like thirty different flags that control what a given person can do with a post, I suspect I’ll end up providing an abridged view of the situation. Now I just have to figure out where to squeeze in the extra info.
To Phil’s credit, he’s also really great at direct guilt trips as well. But unlike most webloggers, when Phil complains, he has a certain panáche that makes him lovable. Perhaps it’s because he’s usually right. Irascible, yes, but usually right.
”Perhaps it’s because he’s usually right.”
Doesn’t hurt. :D
Interesting flash of insight into mother-guilting you two are giving me. My mother, bless her heart, was very good at guilt, quite often without needing to say anything at all, just by expecting better. Probably the reason she did it was exactly my reason too: I can’t force you to do anything, I can’t do it for you (with the exception of WP, where I should have looked first, patched second, bitched third), all I can do is say ”Well. I really did hope you could do better.”
Poor old dear, I wish I had, more often.
As Paul already said this was fixed in 1.5, so bug the site to upgrade. ;) What it actually does is show your comment just like it was a successful post but puts a little note next to it saying it’s awaiting moderation before being public to the world. The note is optional, and not all templates include it.
By the way, after a surprisingly long preview I timed how long it took the above comment to post. From the time I clicked ”post” until my browser refreshed it was 51 seconds.
But this one above was much faster, under 20. I’ll stop now!
Bleah. I don’t even notice anymore, I just leave for another tab and come back later wondering why I have an entry open (at one point, I really wanted to redirect to the anchor for your new comment, but wending my way through the forest of Perl never worked out). I could fake it, doing something like using the comment-pending template to show you what the entry will look like once it rebuilds, but then someone would probably use the resulting nonsense URL as a permalink to link to their comment, and it would wind up being easier to switch than fight.
12 seconds. Someone must have been hammering our shared server while you were commenting. Probably rebuilding an entire Movable Type weblog: I hear those are hell on CPU.
Another thing that can seriously affect response time for posted comments is the email notification. AFAIK, this is not done in background. If, for some reason, Sendmail is responding slowly (there are various reasons why it might be doing that), the comment-posting time can get absurdly long.
Heh. Just commented on an upgraded blog, and got the message, but in a template that put it after the posted-by, so my proto-comment started out
”Phil Ringnalda says: Your comment is awaiting moderation”
I really need to get to downloading and playing with nightlies, so I know what’s behind the surface, before I completely turn into the sort of bug reporter I hate, and start saying ”This should be easy to fix, so I expect you’ll have it done quickly.”
It is tought to beat blog spammers and blog comments getting to the way side sadly, as there is plenty of money to be made. We actually removed out blog from our PS2 Mod Chip site as a result of people spamming the blogs. We wanted to get closer to our customers, offering them installation tips, new product news, etc.. and we found most comments were spam, spam and more spam.