When to approve a comment

How do you know if you should approve a comment for your Wordpress blog? Many people I know approve every comment on their blog. They approve comments, even it is a online.

I recommend you approve comments that only add to user experience and have some value.  Drive by bloggers with useless comments should be deleted. Do you like coming to a blog with a lot of useless comments taking up pages and pages of space and your time?  I do not so do not promote this on your blog even if you are happy to get even one comment.

Blog comments I do not approve

Further, I rather try to have some standards and determine if they are reasonable in terms of spelling grammar and ideas. Sometimes I am more liberal with my approval process.

However blog comments that are misspelled or in chat style I don’t approve. Often, I do not approve ping back as this makes things look cluttered and the idea of ping back even confuse me.

I do not approve comments with links in them unless they are very important relevant links, more often than not people are just simply promoting her own blog.

Disprove of comments that open the door to being hacked

From time to time I have some comments that might look up but there is something funny about them.  I choose not to approve them. Although I do not have proof, I think somehow hackers start to gain access to your blog via first getting approved in the comment section, then latter coming back.

I look at the country of origin for these comments to determine if I should approve them.  For example, I have a Ukrainian language site and when some guy from Vietnam leaves a comment (I ask myself what are the chances of some Vietnamese guys is interesting in Ukrainian grammar) and then I start to see strange activity, I immediately hit the spam button on the comment approval area.

Real names in comments

Further, I look at the user name in the comment section.  If people use their real name then they are less likely to be spam. I am more likely to approve a real name then some fictitious name.  This is because this is less spammy.

Matt Cutts from Google also has this policy, that you should try to use your real name when leaving a comment.  This will significantly cut down on the amount of spam you get because the Internet when it’s anonymous, often comments get out of control.

What you should do is, you should approve comments that are user friendly. That is comments that will help the users experience and genuinely add something to your blog.  Comments just to have more comments in my opinion may seem good but it doesn’t add anything to the experience.

Encourage comments

One last note do not be too paranoid about comment approval.  The point of a blog is to start a conversation, web 2.0 and all.  Many people say very good things in short comments. And of course always try to reply to start the dialogue.  Your blog almost should act as a forum, with user generated content.  Encourage comments, but disprove comments from drive by commenters with little value.

Tags: