A Quick Word on Moderation
We had a minor issue earlier today when a comment that went into moderation caused all manner of confusion. I figured that although we’ve been through the reasoning before, it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick recap now the racing’s all gone quiet.
Remember the Name
I’m sure no-one needs reminding what Internet spam is, and why we like to keep this site free from unwanted marketing campaigns of any sort. In order to minimise exposure to spam we use a service called Akismet. It’s free, simple to work with, and generally speaking it does an excellent job of keeping the place clean and tidy.
If there’s one criticism that can be levelled at the service, its that it can be a little over-zealous when it comes to links. I’ve no idea what algorithms Akismet uses but we’ve done all we can to allow more linkage, yet it doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference.
Presumably, there must be a reason for one link to be allowed but another not, but one can only guess as to what those reasons might be.
The Exception to the Rule
If you happen to post a comment that doesn’t appear immediately, then it’s likely gone into the moderation queue and we’ll get to it as soon as we can. Given that one of us is often around these parts at any given time, that’s usually pretty quick. We watch the queue like hawks, so it’s unlikely we’re going to miss a comment, and you don’t need to do anything in terms of letting us know. We’ll find the comment and un-moderate it as soon as we can.
The only time when this doesn’t happen is when we’re on-air and have several million other things to keep track of. In that instance comments get sorted as soon as we’re done.
Making Our Lives Easier
The flip-side to unwarranted moderation is the times when we intentionally remove comments. Luckily, that seems to only happen a couple of times a year and we’ll let you know if we ever have to do that. Generally speaking though, if your comment goes south, it’s not intentional.
Akismet really is the best compromise between keeping the place free from junk and allowing open discussion. Mostly it’s worked well, but it is a third-party solution (and a free one at that), so, often there’s very little we can do to affect what is and isn’t considered worthy of publishing.
One final point to mention is that the Live Commenting, Live… Thing works differently. The whole system needs tweaking because edited comments don’t ever update and any intentionally moderated comments don’t disappear either. That’s the main reason why the page carries a beta tag in the title.
Update: Totally forgot to mention, that comments on any posts (or pages) that were published more than ten days ago, automatically go into moderation. That’s just an additional anti-spam measure that helps us out, and normally doesn’t affect anyone.
November 18th, 2008 at 15:19 #1 - RubberGoat (Gavin Brown) said:
Noted, thanks for the info. Does Akismet ‘learn’ what is and isn’t spam like some spam filters for mail programs?
November 18th, 2008 at 15:21 #2 - me said:
yup, but from everyone who uses it, rather than just us.
so we can say “xyz site isn’t spam”, but presumably if 100 other people say it is spam then i’m assuming we’re overruled.
November 18th, 2008 at 16:05 #3 - Kathi said:
No wonder links to Keith’ site always end in moderation *is quite evil*
Does it make a difference if the link is just copypasted or as <a href="…"></a> ?
November 18th, 2008 at 16:22 #4 - me said:
as far as i can tell, not in the slightest. i also tried to beat it using tinyurl.com but that didn’t appear to work either.
November 18th, 2008 at 16:23 #5 - Journeyer said:
Hahaha!
Apologies for the earlier issue, guys. Hope you do get around to tweaking it soon.
November 18th, 2008 at 16:34 #6 - me said:
honestly, this isn’t something we can fix. we’re not planning on creating an alternate anti-spam solution and we’re generally quite happy with the way it works.
mostly it’s just links that cause problems, and we maybe have to dig out 4 comments a day or something.
November 18th, 2008 at 16:38 #7 - Journeyer said:
I was talking about tweaking the live commenting thing, not the spam bit.
It can be tweaked, right?
November 18th, 2008 at 16:45 #8 - me said:
ahh, my bad.
yup, there are plenty of live commenting updates planned for the start of next season and we’ll be sure to address those problems.
the big issue we have on that front, is wordpress isn’t a particularly fast platform on which to build a live commenting solution. in effect we can only scale so much before wordpress becomes very expensive in terms of hardware use.
we’re working on it though.
November 18th, 2008 at 17:26 #9 - R.G (As insane as Bernie, as cute as Montagny, as dangerous as Sato) said:
I was trying to post a link to wikipedia in my post just now, and considered it spam.
Which is fairly ridiculous. I understand you Askme thingy does a fine job, is it not possible to allow certain sites?
November 18th, 2008 at 17:51 #10 - mJohnHurt said:
I stopped commenting here (mostly) when a post I made that was slightly “blue” was deleted with no feedback. I can’t remember when it was but it was toward the beginning of the year and it was related to a post about youtube content, because my comment was that I thought it was funny that most of the related video recommendations were porn (the “blue” part was that I included the titles of the videos).
I’m not sure why I got no feedback about it being deleted, but I think an email with a “tsk tsk” in it would have made me feel more like part of the community (like, “we want you to be part of the community, but you were slightly out of what we want the community to be”) while just deleting the comment with no feedback was very ostracizing.
November 18th, 2008 at 17:57 #11 - Christine said:
Really, really sorry. We would never do that on purpose. It may be that if the comment was relating to YouTube videos of a less than savoury variety and suchlike, it went straight into the spam bin rather than the mod queue, and got lost amongst the mountain of pill adverts.
We are not shy about saying if someone has crossed the line, so I can only apologise if you felt left out. It would never be our intention to just cut someone off without mentioning it. It’s something we’re very aware of.
November 18th, 2008 at 18:23 #12 - me said:
i did give feedback.
i’ll have to find it, but i remember i had a huge sulk after it started a trend of men trying to “out swear” each other. i removed about 4 comments in the same post and then moaned about it before going to bed.
i remember it well, but it’ll take me a while to find it.
November 18th, 2008 at 18:42 #13 - me said:
righto, think we’ve found it:
http://www.sidepodcast.com/2008/03/06/sporting-business/#comment-55888
you can read my response there, but if i recall correctly (and it’s been a heck of a long year). your comment started the ball rolling, then others quoted and took it further. to stop the process, i removed all three.
you can read further discussion of the conversation later on in the thread, but by morning i’d clearly gotten over it.
apologies if you think i should’ve done more, recently we have been editing borderline comments with words like: [redacted] or similar. that way it’s even more clear which bit is better of not said. however, it does mean we have to edit someone else’s comment, which may or may not be what people prefer?
it’s a difficult line, and we’re going to cross it sometimes. but i promise we try our best and please, please keep commenting – even if it’s to slap us about a bit (in a family friendly way of course).
November 18th, 2008 at 19:04 #14 - mJohnHurt said:
It wasn’t that thread, it was definitely related to youtube. In fact, I think it was related to sidepodcast diaries. Since the last one of those was posted in feb, I’d think late feb/early march, but I can’t even find a post about the diaries from that period.
It’s true it might have been moderated, depending on how your moderation system works. When I posted the comment, it appeared to me that it had posted fine. I came back later to look at comments and my post was no longer visible and I don’t remember seeing any reference to it (such as the one you posted in the thread you referenced).
I didn’t intend to have you research and justify the experience to me, just providing some user experience feedback.
November 18th, 2008 at 19:11 #15 - me said:
ahh, we don’t mind.
tis all good, do keep commenting though, even if we are mean/nuts/unfit to moderate, everyone else here is lovely