Wednesday 12 October 2011

Comment Moderation and Word Verification

On my ABC Wedenesday post MorningAJ commented that I didn't need moderation and word verification on my comments and that I was wasting our (emboldened) time in having both. I beg to disagree. Here is an example of what happened last time I took word verification off.

"Did you really need to post a picture of your daddy's ***** . It's rancid. And get that b****y broken chair numb ****. And do some constructive work in your bloody life. Why don't you spend the day teaching your son to fix a F******d up bicycle ...."

There was more in that one comment alone.

By having moderation I can protect YOU from that but what about ME.

So for future reference - that's why I have comment moderation - to protect you - and word verification - to protect myself from some of those idiots out there. I don't want to be having to read stuff like that when I turn on my computer. It reduces auto-selling of breast enlargement and viagara - I've never really wanted either - and discourages others from wasting my time and theirs in deleting comments I would rather protect myself from in the first place.

My blog aims to be be reasonably people friendly, ethicqal, uncritical of diversity and non-aggressive (and even child friendly with the exception of the occasional slightly adult joke I couldn't resist for Happy Monday). Why should I have to lower myself to their level when I switch on my comment moderation? The price of fame I hear you say!

(And please don't suggest that I restrict it to people having Google accounts. I do. Have you ever tried complaining about a blogger to Google? Don't waste your time! For a while I had to have it open to all commenters because one of my close friends didn't have a Google account. Too much spam soon put paid to that but thank heavens she now has an account).

9 comments:

  1. I too hate word verification. It's up to you. It's your blog.
    I get the very occasional cretin posting comments. I usually reply.
    REEWAS.......is toady's.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the reply. I still disagree.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fortunately, I think on the 203 (or so) posts I have on my blog, I have had only ONE spam comment so far, and my blog is open to anyone, with or without a google account. Of course, I am a lot less known than you, and have not been living in blogland quite as long; should I have to deal with a sudden increase in spam comments, I guess I would take some steps, too.
    For now, I have activated comment moderation on posts older than 2 weeks - for the simple reason that otherwise I'd never notice the comments made on such older posts.
    You see my comments on almost every one of your posts, and many of your other regular readers comment frequently, too - that goes to show that not everybody sees word verification AND moderation as an obstacle or a nuisance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sadly, the internet seems to reflect just about everything -- the good, bad, and ugly. I've never needed protecting from excess vulgarity. I'm not offended by much. When I hear or see gratuitous obscenity, I write it off to someone who is too lazy to think. Sometimes an obscenity is the perfect word -- like every other word in existence. But just tossing them around for no reason is disappointing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well, MorningAJ, even if you still disagree you've been kind enough to cope with both again - so thank you.

    Librarian, I think one of the problems may be that I have not only been posting for a long time and have a fair number of followers but I also have a lot of blogs on various different subjects. All too often in the past I found someone who had spammed one would spam all of them. That was a lot of rubbish to read through.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I should have added that I agree with AJ and some of her commenters that word verification can be difficult for the disabled. As someone who suffers from double vision I occasionally have to call on Jo's help on some sites but I find blogger's quite easy.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I don't find Bloggers word verification annoying - at least I can read it, unlike some other systems I've seen...

    Thank you for the tip on my snail eggs, I believe you are correct. How cool - I knew about slime moulds, but I had never seen one before (to my knowledge).

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have hardly any followers on any of my blogs and still received lots of spam comments - mostly Chinese and adverts. It's definitely worth having both word verification and comment moderation in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I think my earlier comment went astray....still trying to fathom out exactly what to do each time.

    I just wanted to say, I love your posts, and typing a few extra characters is a very small price to pay to read such interesting things. So do whatever you need to do, to spare yourself (and us) from the idiots of the world.

    Take care and God bless, love, Carol

    ReplyDelete

Hello - thanks for dropping by to leave a comment. Your comments are much appreciated even if I don't always reply. They will appear as soon as they have been moderated.

Blog Archive