As you know, my top 10 blog posts I read on vacation on Monday included Shel Holtz’s blog about moderating comments. Then, as we were recording InsidePR yesterday, we discussed the issue again. You can read Shel’s post here and listen to the discussion with Joe Thornley here. Sneak peak: Joe and I disagree about moderating blog comments.

I included Shel’s post because I think it’s an interesting viewpoint and because I don’t like reading only those things that support my thinking. I respect the heck out of his decision to moderate his comments. We all have different strategies for our blogs. His clearly is not the same as ours…plus he thinks if someone says something negative about someone else on his blog, he’s liable.

I vehemently disagree!

He says he found a comment that said, “Name redacted is a thief and imposter take no note of him. He is a fly by night character that moves on as he owes money.”

Come on. First of all, if that got through the spam filter (which is unlikely it would), who is to say you can’t go back and unapprove it later? Have guidelines on your blog that state you will delete comments that appear libelous to you. And delete it.

He goes on to say that he gets a lot of spam that isn’t caught. Again, I call baloney. There are great spam filters in the best commenting systems such as Livefyre (which we use and LOVE), Disqus, and Intense Debate. We don’t moderate our comments and I think I’ve had to delete maybe two spam comments that got through the filter in the past six months. (more…)