I’ve got a guest post over on Daily Blog Tips this week:
You have lovingly crafted a blog post, containing pearls of wisdom which you are sure will enthral, entertain and enlighten the world. You have taken on board advice from experts on how to craft a good headline, you’ve found a great graphic to illustrate it, you’ve remembered to polish the text with search-engine optimised language, and so you hit publish, right? Wrong.
You can read the full post here.
Previous posts on LDV with blogging tips and advice
- Why giving our your web address may not be such a good idea
- How should you moderate blog comments?
- What should political bloggers be trying to achieve?
- Blogging in adversity – don’t stop just because a piece of bad news hits
- Useful information for Liberal Democrat bloggers – the tools the party makes available to help
- and Stephen on Why blogging matters to Lib Dems more than most
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16 Comments
“How should you moderate blog comments?”
The answer is certainly not to take advice from anyone at LDV about this. For about the fifth or sixth time, I have been unable to comment on my own article this week. No sensible feedback, you just hit submit and the comment goes into a black hole. It’s really poor and just pours treacle all over the conversation.
In general, I would say that it is a major blind spot of blogging to give insufficient consideration to what happens below the line. The Guardian made this mistake more or less from the off, with the result that most of the intelligent commenters have long since disappeared, just leaving the yapping anonymous cretins behind.
This renders the thread unreadable and undermines the whole point of blogging which is foster a sensible debate and to develop a relationship with one’s readership as far as time allows. It’s no longer blogging – it’s just writing articles with some stuff at the bottom which nobody reads. This is not new media, it’s just the same old media.
Anyone planning a new blog should START with below the line. You want to invite somebody into your living room? How about making it a pleasant place to be. A place to which you might want to return another time. Any pub owner would get it immediately. But some bloggers can be just a bit slow.
Laurence Boyce.
[posted anonymously because it’s too unreliable otherwise]
Laurence: the explanations I and others have given you previously apply this week as well. Your comments are particularly prone to being wrongly tagged as spam by Akismet, which is one of the widely (and I think most widely) used spam filtering options for WordPress sites. I’m not sure if this is because of the IP address you’re posting from or whether it’s because the link to your blogger profile has previously been scrapped and included in spam messages, but either way this isn’t really an issue to do with moderation.
This site gets several hundred spam messages a day usually, and they are regularly checked through by people volunteering their time to do this to spot any wrongly trapped message.
I appreciate the frustration if a comment is wrongly blocked (it annoys me when it happens to me too), though I hope you appreciate that if someone hasn’t sorted this immediately that’s because there isn’t an army of people sat checking the spam folder every 30 seconds just in case you’ve just posted a comment.
Well there bloody well should be! 🙂
LB
Cryptosocialist stooges, think the answer to everything is to throw money at it and employ an army of the great unwashed, rant rant etc….
Mark – as a general point, I find a similar issue with posts that disappear, the comments page does not update regularly, it returns to earlier page versions etc. Bizarre.
And for David Allen’s benefit – it was never like this before Clegg became leader … 😉
Tabman, the latter is due to the caching system used to reduce server load. Rather than constantly checking the database for every page load, the frontend checks the same page every few minutes.
So your comment will normally be there, but won’t show for a few minutes. It’s frustrating at times, but basically the site’s a victim of its own success and can’t afford the upgrade to the server, this is a nice middle ground solution.
@Mark (Ryan, etc) perhaps a warning in the comments box or after hitting submit that says “it may take up to X minutes for your comment to display” and combine that with a different bit about spam filtering and similar?
Laurence, I once got locked out of my own website due to spam protection, I was in a shared house witha shared IP, and my housemate had no security on his PC at all, it was so horribly infected, we’d been listed in several spam listings.
I effectively couldn’t post, nor could I comment, I had to turn all the protection off, and that really hurt my inbox and server load. It’s a tradeoff, but ultimately, the fault is people who don’t run adequate virus/spyware/bot protection on their PCs, the rest of us suffer because of it.
“… I find a similar issue with posts that disappear, the comments page does not update regularly, it returns to earlier page versions etc. Bizarre.”
Yes, there’s clearly a problem with out-of-date versions of pages being served. It happens all the time. And it’s not a problem I’ve noticed with any other website.
The last time I raised this I was told that CTRL/F5 would solve it, but it doesn’t.
“Tabman, the latter is due to the caching system used to reduce server load. Rather than constantly checking the database for every page load, the frontend checks the same page every few minutes.”
Sorry, but I really don’t think that’s what’s happening.
I often see an older version of the page after I’ve seen a newer one.
And the problem is always solved by adding a random query string to the URL.
Surely, one solution would be to allow people to post with a password and people like Laurence could then be flagged as not requiring moderation and the spam would still be kept out
Re: the meat of the post.
Surely, if you plan to catch all your readers, you put just BEFORE the busy time, rather than during it?
And, of course, RSS makes it all go to cock anyway, given that there is quite often a delay between you hitting post and the RSS reader checking it. And a reader who is really busy one day might be not busy the same day the following week.
So really, best just to hit post and hope, given the number of variables involved, unless you have lots of contributors, in which case you want to space things out.
BTW, I have just seen the prices for internet access at Harrogate. £4 an hour? How am I supposed to do the thing for Lib Con at THOSE prices?
Laurence, would you be willing to pass a CAPTCHA in order to bypass the human filtering? That is another option
@Voter, captchas don’t work.
Firstly they put a lot of presure on our server generating the images.
Secondly even I struggle at getting them correct on the first go.
And finally spammers are very good at creating software to beat them.
Some standard CAPTCHAs may be poor.
I have heard claims that reCAPTCHA addresses two of the above objections. Since they host the images, the server load would not be on the Voice servers.
I think that reCAPTCHA may not be vulnerable to simple attacks as the images keep changing.
If the Voice has not had a trial run using reCAPTCHA, I would suggest one be done. If it fails, you can also return to human screening.
If it works, it would allow people to be freed up to do better stuff for the party.
I don’t regard CAPTCHA as a workable solution, but if you allow authenticated users to post unfiltered, then that will work – the only problem is that you need to ensure that the account is valuable. I suggest the Liberal Democrats Account as that’s tied to a membership fee.
I’m in the CAPTCHA-sceptic camp too, but that’s not to say there aren’t alternatives we can look it. The LDV team had a chat about this earlier today, and if we can come up with a workable alternative, we’ll certainly implement it.
I hate capchas and recapcha, I get whey they’re used, but I’d rather they weren’t.
When I first started using WordPress, I had problems with my own comments disappearing into spam filtering, even though I was logged in as an admin. I hope they’ve sorted that out, but basically, spam is a problem and site owners do what they can.
Allowing registered users to comment unscreened and spam trapping suspect comments from non account holders would be fine if it works, but there’s always the problem of account hijacking and people being reticent to register–allowing the LD account or OpenID would be my preferred solution if both are doable at once.