Tag Archives: Google

Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation

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Pre-moderating: sensible thing to do or petty censorship?

When it comes to pre-moderating comments on blogs I have to say that I’m a little bit baffled. If you’re a site for children I totally get it; and the same for a news or media outlet, but if you’re just one of a boat load of blogs out there, from the big name to the small time, what’s the rationale for pre-moderating comments?

News sites tend to moderate the hell out of their comments. Given that they are in the business of spreading news to hundreds of millions of people it behooves them to keep a tight reign on the content below their headers. The last thing they need is for some wingnut to fly off the handle in front of an audience the size of most nations.

For most things corporate I understand as well, though I do find it refreshing when the big players don’t turn every web page like a giant legal cover-your-ass exercise. The Google Blog doesn’t moderate their comments – at least it doesn’t pre-moderate them (it’s possible they just delete anything that doesn’t meet their standards for submission after it’s posted). While Google isn’t exactly a small time company they’re also well known for being a little more relaxed about things so I’m taking the absence of pre-moderation of comments for what it’s worth.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8gCV0KYdJc?rel=0]

As for my little corner of the blogosphere I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a comment would need my approval before I allowed it on my site. It smells a little bit like censorship, don’t you think? Besides, who the hell am I to say what people can and cannot say about something I fully intended the entire Internet to read (or at least a few hundred people)?

Back in 2005 I had a different blog and one particular asshole starting commenting and causing a ruckus. For a time I just didn’t allow comments in hopes he would find someone else to hassle but realizing that it wasn’t fair to other readers who did want to comment I turned them back on. It was at this point that I tinkered with the idea of moderating the comments. In the end I chose not to, but had my finger on the “report” button just in case he got out of hand. He never did. Contrary to some beliefs, there are a lot of problems that will just go away if you ignore them.

A brief poll to a few friends who blog and a little bit of research on the web dug up the following nuggets of extrememly precise data:

  • A large number do not moderate their comments
  • Many only moderate for spam
  • Some use a form of word verification
It would seem that for those who moderate spam is the biggest concern. No one wants a slew of ads and unrelated links clogging up their comments section and this is where I think the word verification comes in. That was one thing I ended up implementing myself, and as far as a security feature goes; forcing a person to enter in a couple words just so you know they’re not a robot isn’t much, but it does keeps the spam down and in my case also allows anonymous comments (while I prefer people stand in front of their comments by putting their name on them, I can understand that some people may have concerns over privacy and things like that).

There’s lots of comment plug-ins for the popular platforms like Blogger and WordPress and both have at least a couple variations on moderation. Another one is Disqus, which I used for a while but abandoned for reasons I don’t remember.

But to the question at hand, is it just best practice or are we making it out to be worse than it is? As far as my blog goes, I’ve decided that until I actually have a problem I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like to think of it as giving the public an opportunity to disappoint.

So far, they have not (except this person).

~ Andrew

For those interested, here’s a sampling of a few news sites and their moderation policies:

NY Times
Click this sentence for just the policy text

CBC
Click this sentence for just the policy text

Huffington Post

Quiet Writer Drives Through

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There are a few (thousand) things that drive me nuts and my top three are: made up words, spelling mistakes, and improper grammar. Several years ago a friend and co-worker pointed out to me that language is an evolving tool. Humans have been communicating orally and in writing for thousands of years and it’s only natural that the manner in which humans communicate evolves along with the people doing the communicating. He cited a very acceptable example of Old English and how many of the words, phrases, and rules have fallen out of favour and changed to become what people use today. When he made the argument I had very little to say in terms of a retort other than, “Well that doesn’t mean I have to like it!”.

It all started when I was out at Tim Horton’s getting a coffee and I noticed that their sign on the outside read “Drive Thru”. There was more than enough room for them to write “Drive Through” but instead they chose a shortened version of the word. In an effort to attract a younger demographic, maybe they thought it looked more current; maybe three fewer letters were significantly cheaper to print; maybe, the marketing geniuses that they are, they didn’t like the way “through” looked. I suspect we’ll never know. All I knew is that I didn’t like it and I needed someone to blame. Fortunately, on practically every street corner I saw this:

Their spelling sucks and their food will make you fat
This generated quite a bit of discussion in the office, and seeing as this was in the early days of Google some of us took to the Internet to seek out the origins of purposefully misspelled words; and wouldn’t you know it, one of the earliest offenders was none other than Remington, makers of among other things, typewriters. That’s right, a typewriter company went and named a model using a made up word: Quiet-Riter.
Shame on you, Remington. Shame on you!
As you can see, there is no shortage of real estate on the front of that typewriter, so why bother to bastardize the word “writer”? One can only hope this was a purposeful example of irony, but I suspect we’ll never know.
I can accept the fact that English is a complicated language. There are more exceptions than there are rules, and there are a crap-tonne of rules. It used to be that you couldn’t get out of grade school unless you knew all the rules and could show proper command of the language. Over the last few decades things seem to have shifted. With computers that will auto-correct your mistakes and provide you with properly formatted sentences, actually knowing the rules and how to implement them has become less important.
Unfortunately, what this doesn’t do is prevent people from screwing things up time and time again, and putting their glorious mistakes on the very Internet that would provide them with the required correction within seconds. It’s a sad state of affairs when we’d rather post grammatically deficient drivel than spend the eight seconds it takes to Google it and post something proper. Fortunately, there’s an army of people out there who are more than willing to correct everyone else’s mistakes: they are the Grammar Police (also less affectionately known as Grammar Nazis) and they are a growing faction of grammarians to which I someday hope to belong. They’re an easy bunch to spot, just look on Facebook for posts like these:
If you don’t know what an Oxford Comma is, Google it,
and for God’s sake USE IT!
We all know that some rules were made to be broken, and that sentiment is holds true for writing as well. As much as the Grammar Police, literary purists, and academics would like you to believe otherwise, sometimes you have to break a few rules to get the result you are looking for (see what I did there?). Here are eleven rules that are just asking to be broken:
Breaking rules is fun!
I completely understand that in writing this post I am opening myself up to criticism and ridicule from just about every angle. Those lax in their usage of proper spelling and grammar will thumb their noses at me, or possibly give me the finger; those with a stronger command of the rules will look down their noses at me, waggle their finger, and utter something condescending under their breath; and there will be a few who take this opportunity to correct every mistake they can find in an effort to feel superior and make me feel shame. Well, I can guarantee you I will feel no shame. I can assure you that there are no spelling mistakes or typos in this post.  The lack of red squiggly underlines and a solid proofread have taken care of that.
As for the punctuation and grammar, well, it’s entirely possible that I know exactly what I’m doing and I have just embedded various mistakes in an effort to be clever. It’s also possible that I’m a giant hypocrite with limited grasp on the rules who just likes to criticize others. I suspect you’ll never know.
~ Andrew