{"id":1780,"date":"2011-05-25T09:21:50","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T00:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-05-25\/1780"},"modified":"2011-05-25T09:21:50","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T00:21:50","slug":"the-challenge-of-comment-moderation-in-a-spiteful-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-05-25\/1780","title":{"rendered":"The Challenge of Comment Moderation in a Spiteful World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Moderating blog comments — the triage to weed out spam and such\nbefore making submitted comments visible to the public — can get\ncomplicated. Obvious spam is easy (delete it), as are obviously on-topic\nrelevant personal comments without links (approve it). But there's a lot<\/span> in\nbetween.<\/p>\n\n

In particular, if there's a link you have to consider where it goes, and\nthe commenter's purpose for including the link. On one end<\/span> of the spectrum,\nspammers will just copy the text of a previously<\/span>-approved comment and add a\nlink<\/span> to a site<\/span> they're spamming for. Or someone<\/span> will write something that\nat first appears to be relevant, but in such a generic<\/span> way that it seems\nits only purpose is to get their link to show up on your blog. For example,\nafter I post<\/span> something like “A Few<\/span> Japanese Swords of\nNote<\/a>”, I'll see comments along the lines of \"Thank you for nice and\ninformative data. Japanese swords can be full of history and a\ngood<\/span> investment<\/u><\/i>\", with a link<\/span> going to some commercial site trading\nin Japanese swords. Spam.<\/p>\n\n

(Years ago, I posted “Creative Street-Sweeper\nDesign<\/a>” about a street<\/span> cleaner that four-year-old Anthony had made out\nof Lego, and got a comment<\/span> with a link<\/span> back to a company<\/span> that makes actual\nstreet-cleaning vehicles, but rather than spam, I felt it<\/span> was cute, so approved\nit<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n

But what if someone offers a comment that simply disagrees with you?\nWhat if they're annonymous. Or on the<\/span> other hand, what if they provide a\nlink<\/span> to their site? Could half their intent be to get a visit<\/span> back to their\nsite? But what if<\/span> the link would actually be a benefit<\/span> for your\nreaders?<\/p>\n\n

There are no clear answers, but I find<\/span> the following two situations,\nwhen taken together, to be telling...<\/p>\n\n

A month ago, I made my<\/span> disappointment clear about some shameful\nmarketing by Scott Kelby (in my “The Amazing\nMarketing Power of Scott Kelby<\/a>” post, and a followup<\/span><\/a>), but even\nthough I wrote<\/span> those in response to specific posts on Scott Kelby's site, I never<\/span> attempted to mention them in comments on his site, because that could\nbe considered self-serving spam, rather than a benefit<\/span> to him or his\nreaders. I offered<\/span> a benefit<\/span> to his readers by simply pointing out his\nerror and asking for clarification. When a few<\/span> days later I developed<\/span> a new<\/span>\nsolution<\/a> to address some of the issues under discussion, I didn't<\/span>\nattempt to even mention it in a comment<\/span> on his site even though it would\nhave been a benefit<\/span> to his readers, because I thought<\/span> it might be\nconsidered rude.<\/p>\n\n

So that was then. A week or<\/span> so ago, I tried<\/span> to leave a comment<\/span> on the\nblog of one of Scott Kelby's business partners, Matt Kloskowski's\n“Lightroom Killer Tips”. He posted<\/span> a two<\/span>-paragraph item “Lightroom\nTip - Facebook and Flickr Commenting<\/a>” in which the first paragraph was\nan unrelated advertisement for Scott Kelby training DVDs, and the second\npointing out a potentially<\/span>-overlooked aspect of Lightroom's built in\nPublish feature. The ensuing<\/span> comments by his readers brought up\nquestions\/concerns about how these features worked, but no answers from\nMatt or other commenters. Well, considering that I've written more Publish\nplugins than the rest of the world, including Adobe, combined, this is an\narea I'm familiar with, so I thought<\/span> to offer a comment<\/span> to help those\nreaders..<\/p>\n\n

Here's the comment I submitted to Matt's post<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n

\n

To answer a few questions others have made in the comments....<\/p>\n\n

The support Matt refers to is available in all language\/region versions of Lr3.<\/p>\n\n

If the Facebook integration seems to have stopped working, make sure you've upgraded to Lr3.4, and if that alone doesn't help, try the “Remove Authorization” button, then re-authorize your account.<\/p>\n\n

About publishing to Facebook fan pages, Facebook didn't allow third-party apps to do that until recently, so it wasn't possible when Lr3 came out. For what it<\/span>'s worth, my Facebook plugin for Lightroom<\/a> (which is unrelated to the Adobe one built in, and can run side-by-side with Adobe's if you like) does allow publishing to fan pages and the like.<\/p>\n\n

BTW, the bit about comments being deleted if you republish a Facebook<\/span> image is a Facebook<\/span> issue, not a Lightroom<\/span> issue.<\/p>\n\n

About the “some pics stay in 'republish' forever”, that should have been fixed with Lr3.4.<\/p>\n\n

About Flickr and video, again, for what it's worth, my Flickr plugin<\/a> can do it.\nI have<\/span> a lot<\/span> of Lightroom plugins<\/a>, but where they overlap with Adobe's built-in support, my plugins tend to be more complex.\nThis is good if you need more features than Adobe has provided, but more complex means more complex to understand and use, so they may not be for everyone.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

The question facing Matt when this comment arrived in his inbox: is this spam or a benefit<\/span> to your readers?<\/p>\n\n

If you read the post and the other comments, what I've added is clearly\non topic, relevant, and helpful, but yet, there are links, so you've got to\nbe more careful. Do these<\/span> links benefit Matt's readers? Two of them<\/span> are\nspecific answers that solve specific reader questions, and the third is of\ngeneric interest to any Lightroom user, so yeah, overall this is an obvious\nbenefit for Matt's readers, and a comment<\/span> that one would think Matt would\nbe happy to get.<\/p>\n\n

However, when I looked the next day, the comment had not appeared, even to\nme with the “your comment is awaiting moderation” note it had right after I\nsubmitted<\/span> it. That's odd.<\/p>\n\n

Perhaps I had made a mistake and didn't actually submit it, so I sent<\/span> it\nin again, and waited. After four days, I'd seen many<\/span> other comments on\nMatt's site being approved, so I knew<\/span> that he wasn't on vacation or something,\nbut my comment was still invisible to his\nreaders, appearing only to me (and, of course, to Matt). Could he be\nwithholding this help for his readers out of spite for me? It'd be sad<\/span> to\nsee an adult be so petty and small, especially at the expense of his readers, so perhaps it had just been overlooked. I added<\/span> a private<\/span> followup comment asking whether my comment might be approved....<\/p>\n\n

The next day, my comment was no longer visible even to me, indicating\nthat Matt had simply deleted it.<\/p>\n\n

Sad. And telling.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moderating blog comments -- the triage to weed out spam and such before making submitted comments visible to the public -- can get complicated. Obvious spam is easy (delete it), as are obviously on-topic relevant personal comments without links (approve it). But there's a lot in between.<\/p>

In particular, if there's a link you have to consider where it goes, and the commenter's purpose for including the link. On one end of the spectrum, spammers will just copy the text of a previously-approved comment and add a link to a site they're spamming for. Or someone will write something that [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,13,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}