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Opportunities Presented By The New Commenting System

Now that the new commenting system is a reality, many blogger are learning that the filters provided in the new system need training.

Until the filters are trained, we will continue to see unwanted comments in our "Awaiting Moderation" folder.

Before the new system was provided, many of us who moderated comments may have gotten used to simply moderating when we had nothing else to do. We would let comments "awaiting moderation" pile up for days, before selecting and "Publishing" or "Rejecting" each one, in turn.

With the new system, what we decide may make a difference to someone else.

Our "spam" votes will affect other peoples moderation - and theirs, ours.

If enough of us "vote" a given comment to be spam, other folks, later receiving the same comment, may see their version of the unwanted comment go straight to their "Spam" folder. That's how a heuristic moderation system should work. Conversely, other folks, promptly moderating their queue, may cause some of our unwanted comments, later received, to go straight into our "Spam" folder.

In other cases, some legitimate comments may be detected as spam by the classification process. You may want to check your Spam folder occasionally, and select "Not Spam" for those legitimate comments that are there. This should make the classification process more reliable for everybody.

The sooner we act, the sooner everybody sees relief.

The bottom line is that, the sooner we moderate and click "Spam", the sooner that other bloggers will see relief. And thus encouraged, other bloggers should do likewise.

The thing to remember is that the total amount of work done, by each of us, will be the same - however we moderate. Moderating 100 comments will take us the same amount of time - whether we moderate in batches of 100, once (and late) - or 10 comments, in 10 batches (and promptly). The difference is that the sooner we moderate, the sooner the filters should be trained.

If everybody pulls together, we all help each other.

Long term, the only people hurt by us moderating more often will be the spammers. And our readers will benefit, by seeing their comments, awaiting moderation, published sooner. This will make our comments more active, which will be good for all of us.

And that should make all of us (except the spammers) feel better.

Just remember, the new system is not optional. Everybody has to work together, to make it work.

Comments

thunderbird1727 said…
R.I.P. Spammers ;(
Thank you SO much for answering my question about losing followers due to changing a blog's name. I appreciate the time and effort that you put into the answer!! I will be following your blog. Many thanks. Bonni G.
Martin Gray said…
Thanks for this, I'm currently having to delete one comment by Buy Kamagra every two minutes. I take it this is the successor to Generic Viagra, which seems to have gone quiet.
teddytrump said…
Thanks for your post... always useful for me
Poetrydiva said…
In reply to 'Buy Kamagra" that's just a play on Viagra the spammers do have access to knowledge about filters and usually change a syllable in the message to get it to go through. I usually just delete it because it has a long message to it and can't recognize it's origin. It is definitely a pain and very distasteful to those who have a valid message to send to the community
I want the bloody Automatic Spam detection to go away! All genuine comments on my site have been disabled. I do not have a spam problem and would very much appreciate being LEFT ALONE!
ARGGGG##!

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