Moderating comments is a simple but powerful way to protect your social site from the evil ways of spammers.

When you moderate comments they are pushed into a queue for review prior to being made viewable on the website. This feature adds an extra step to your process as the proprietor of a social site because you have to take the time to review your moderation queue on a regular basis. The time is well spent because your site visitors will appreciate the fact that your pages are not ridden with nonsensical links that include links to shady drug sites, gambling sites and online porn portals.

Moderation features differ depending on the tool or service that you are using. All the good blogging tools including my staples, MovableType, Blogger and WordPress have good comment moderation features. These tools will send an email along if a comment has hit your moderation queue. This saves a bit of time since I don’t have to keep checking my queue for the latest updates.

Moderation isn’t just for blog sites either. Think of any and all sites you’re maintaining that allow users to post feedback. Bulletin Board systems are a great example of a site where you want to be careful about how easily spam can get onto your board. A few months ago I experienced a spam attack on a Frappr map that I maintain. Those dirty spammers hit the whole community on a single day and lots of folks were scrambling to clean up their sites and get the comment moderation features configured for their maps.

It is very important to note that comment moderation features alone won’t solve all of your spam problems. One frustration that you’re likely to experience is having to sift through a mountain of spam in order to approve the few good comments. According to the folks who’ve created the spam early warning system Akismet, 92% of all comments are spam. One way to get around this problem is to add another layer of protection.

I’ve already written about Akismet and Bad Behavior in earlier posts. These are tools that you can employ to stop spam before it gets to your moderation queue. The extra effort in implementing early warning tools is paid back when you’re spending a lot less time managing your comments.

That being said, here are some guidelines for configuring and utilizing comment moderation on your social website:

• Know your site comment moderation features.
• Use your site comment moderation features.
• Configure so that you are notified when new comments are posted to the queue.
• Approve good comments as promptly as possible.
• Do your best to implement features that balance security against spammers with friendliness for legit contributors to your site.

I know that there is some gray area in those guidelines. That’s the nature of the game unfortunately. Since security tools and ugly spammer techniques change its best to try and keep up with the latest and greatest in spam protection. The good news is that if I find out anything new I’ll let you know.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Spam, Security, Comments, Moderation[/tags]