The Pro's and Cons of Comment Moderation

The easier it is to leave comments, the more you'll get. That's a fact. Unfortunately, there are some who have taken advantage of this by programming 'robots' to leave spam-like comments which are actually embedded with links to others sites- usually sites of question.

Blogger has made it easier to limit the junk comments. You, the blogger, have the choice to let anyone leave any kind of comment at a minimum, strictly restrict the ability of commenting , allow a range of abilities between the two or just not allow any commenting.

The thing about commenting is that if you are interested in traffic, you want as much commenting as possible.

How do I moderate comments on my blog? According to Blogger:

 

• Enable comment moderation by selecting 'Yes' on the Settings | Comments tab.
• Enter an email address if you want to approve or reject comments via email (optional).

 

You can find the comment moderation setting on the Settings | Commentstab, along with all of the other comment settings. It's just a simple yes/no option, and looks like this:

Choosing "yes" drops down an email form. This lets you moderate comments via email without affecting your regular comment notification setting. It is optional, since you can always moderate comments through the Blogger interface.

So set the option to "yes," enter a notification address if desired, save the settings, and wait for your next comment. All incoming comments will now go to a special "Moderate Comments" page, which you can find under the Posting tab:

On this page, you will see a list of all the comments that have been created but have not yet been approved or rejected. (This list excludes any comments made by admin members of the blog.) By default, they will be sorted by the time they were created, but you can also group them by their respective posts, by clicking the "Post Name" sort option at the top.

Each line in the list displays the beginning of the comment, the author's name, and the time it was created. Clicking the triangle to the left will expand the row to show the full text of the comment, along with "Publish" and "Reject" links, which you can use to approve or disapprove the comment. You can also select multiple comments and publish or reject them all at once, by using the check boxes on the left hand side and the buttons at the top or bottom of the list.

This entire process can also be done via email. If you entered an email address for moderation, you will get a message for each comment which will contain "Publish" and "Reject" links, as well as a link to the main moderation page for the blog. For example: