A blog is a personal space in the virtual world that an author uses to express his thought, views, opinion or idea about a subject or an event. A majority of blogs invite the reader to leave their comments, suggestions or feedback. Some of the readers’ opinions are immediately posted on the blog. They go live as soon as the reader posts his comment. However, there are blogs that require their respective owners to approve the comments before they are posted on the blog. You must have come across the words that your comment has to ‘moderator approval pending’ before it is available for everyone to read. This means that the comment has to be officially permitted by the blog moderator before it appears on the blog.
A majority of blogs irrespective of their niche allow users’ comments to go live on the blog. However, a few blog owners to maintain standards follow a blog moderation policy of approving comments. A few of the best blog comment moderation policies have been discussed below:
Filter out false and ambiguous comments
The number of people commenting on various blog posts has seen a sharp increase especially with the aim to generate traffic to a particular website. This makes blog posts prone to comments that are flattery and many-a-times they are immaterial to the respective blog post. As an experienced blog moderator, you must be able to separate fake comments from the real. The former is artificial and lacks quality.
Do away with copied and borrowed comments
Many blog readers leave a comment just for the sake of commenting on your blog post. Very often we come across comments with the same wordings on several blog posts. Technology blogs, for instance, face this issue. The blog can be about the latest gadget launched in the market. A reader must not have even got his hands on the gadget. Conveniently, the reader copies a comment about the product from another blog and posts the same on your blog post, thus passing it off as his original comment. As a blog moderator, you must be done away with such kind of borrowed comments.
Eliminate comments used to settle personal scores
As a blog moderator, you can tolerate comments and criticism about the respective blog post. However, when the reader gets personal, which a few readers deliberately do to settle personal scores, it becomes your responsibility to eliminate such comments. Leaving a blog comment that personally attacks the author is not a professional way of settling personal scores. Using names to refer to the author or abusing the blog owner is a common form of settling personal scores that must strictly be prohibited by blog moderators. Eliminate such comments.
Erase comments irrelevant to the topic
Many readers tend to go off the tangent while commenting on blog posts. When you feel that a particular comment is irrelevant, make sure you erase it as its presence does not serve any purpose.
These are a few things as a blog moderator you can look into before you approve or disapprove of a comment. To ensure you have only quality comments on your blog posts, you can
- Follow a strict commenting policy and stand by it; come what may
- Be just and honest
- Keep in touch with readers who comment on your blog posts
Writing a blog comment is more than just an easy task. However, the challenge is accepting or denying the comment. Experience is the best teacher for any blog comment moderator to approve or disapprove comments.