Imposing moderation and ending anonymity
Have you noticed that inconsiderate people post repeated off-topic comments, rumors, insults and other forms of comment spam in the discussion sections on blogs or publication Web sites you used to enjoy? You can sometimes find the same rant or obscenity-filled nonsense from some nut-case repeated in multiple sections of the blog and even in different blogs. The problem is so severe that some high-traffic blogs are changing their comments policies. For example, the Huffington Post Website published this explanation:
“In an effort to encourage the same level of civil dialogue among Politics Daily’s readers that we expect of our writers – a ‘civilogue,’ to use the term coined by PD’s Jeffrey Weiss – we are requiring commenters to use their AOL or AIM screen names to submit a comment, and we are reading all comments before publishing them. Personal attacks (on writers, other readers, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, or anyone at all) and comments that are not productive additions to the conversation will not be published, period, to make room for a discussion among those with ideas to kick around.”
Regulating content in private forums
As I was researching the problem, I ran across a sad little valedictory to unrestricted commenting in November 2009 when a literary agent called Kristin explained that she had decided to start moderating her forum. What interested me was that the response from her readers on that page was overwhelmingly positive: I counted 58 of the 62 comments as supportive of her decision; many expressed regrets for the extra work it would impose on Kristin.
Here at Network World, some cretin has been posting illiterate maunderings about handbags and shoes on our commentary section in the “Security Strategies” pages, causing extra work for staff members at Network World as they have to get their cat-litter-box scoops out to clean up the section. Surely few readers would doubt that Network World has the right to remove such comment spam from any comments section it chooses to clean up.
Network World Editor Ryan Francis says that Network World is looking at a couple of options, such as authenticating users, manually approving each comment, restricting comments by time of day, or restricting posting rights by domain. The publication uses Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). However, hackers have found ways around many types of CAPTCHAs.
Some newspapers around the country have gone to the extent of charging users to comment.
Google Blog has an interesting note from 2005 about automatically tagging postings that include hyperlinks with the “nofollow” attribute so that the link doesn’t get included in computations of referral frequency by search engines. Comment spammers are merely irritating the people who see their nonsense in the blogs; the spammers derive no additional visibility in Google, MSN Search or Yahoo for their Web sites.
As the amount of rubbish increases in comments sections all over the Web, I think we will see increasing control being exerted by owners of blogs and other Websites.
In the next column, I’ll look at ways of controlling comment spam.
