Skip to main content

Comment Moderation Is A Team Effort

High class universities, such as Eton, Harvard, and Yale, have a unique and intriguing sport that's enjoyed by both participants and spectators - team rowing.

The participants work together, and propel their oar driven boats through the water at astounding speeds, by synchronising their oar movements.

In team rowing, the team manager, or coxswain, is an essential participant. The coxswain does no rowing, but still contributes to the success of the team, by keeping the rowing synchronised. Without synchronisation, a team is useless. Team members not rowing - or worse, rowing out of step - slow the boat.

The new comment moderation system is designed around the principles of team rowing.

The collaborative, heuristic filters were designed to require everybody's input, in identifying spam comments.

People who don't want to participate are like team rowers who decide to not row - they contribute only dead weight. When they insist that Blogger should make the new filters optional, they are like those who would row out of step - and they damage the filters for everybody.
  • Blogger would have another project to do, which would take them away from other, more needed activities.
  • Your input, identifying your spam messages, would be unavailable. Other bloggers have to flag more spam messages, without your input.
  • With an additional control, other bloggers will have another setting to misuse. Other bloggers have to flag still more spam messages, without the input from folks who would select the new setting, unwittingly.
  • Other bloggers, listening to the dissident team members, are less inclined to moderate in synchronisation also.
  • Spammers succeed in getting more spam comments published, and see more financial benefits. This encourages them to continue their activities.

As bloggers, we all need to pull together, and synchronise our efforts. Only if we all pull together, will spammers be stopped from abusing our blogs.

Comments

EscapeGames24 said…
Thanks for your great help on Blogger Support Forum ;-)
Thanks its really Informative, Now i got the point

Popular posts from this blog

Embedded Comments And Main Page View

The option to display comments, embedded below the post, was made a blog option relatively recently. This was a long requested feature - and many bloggers added it to their blogs, as soon as the option was presented to us. Some blog owners like this feature so much, that they request it to be visible when the blog is opened, in main page view. I would like all comments, and the comment form, to be shown underneath the relevant post, automatically, for everyone to read without clicking on the number of comments link. And this is not how embedded comments work.

What's The URL Of My Blog?

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".

With Following, Anonymous Followers Can't Be Blocked

As people become used to Blogger Following as just another tool to connect people, they start to think about the implications . And we see questions like How do I block someone who's been following my blog secretly? I couldn't see her in my Followers list (hence I couldn't use the "Block this user" link), but I have looked at her profile and could see that she's Following my blog. Following, when you look at the bottom line, is no more than a feed subscription and an icon (possibly) displayed on your blog, and linking back to the profile of the Follower in question. If someone Follows your blog anonymously, all that they get is a subscription to the blog feed. If you publish a feed from your blog, and if the feed is open to anybody (which, right now, is the case ), then it's open to everybody. If someone wants to use Following to subscribe to the feed, you can't stop this. You can't block it before, or after, the fact. You can't Block w