When Writing a Blog, or publishing Comments

I love comment moderation for one simple fact, you can moderate you comments from older blog posts with some care as well as keeping the new ones looking neat and professional.  The benefit to this is that you can quickly see who is publishing a comment simply for the ability to get a link to their blog.  What amazes me as a writer is that the commenter seemed to believe it would be published.  This isn’t the case.  A link to someone’s blog, especially one which deals with more mature themes doesn’t have a place here.

Unfortunately the only thing about comment moderation is that there are days when I find some people comment and then comment and comment on older posts of mine, and I have a hard time with getting writing done.  There is simply too many and writing a blog post is hard enough as it is.  It should be assumed that the blog post should be good enough that people will want to go out and read your writing, and not only that, but then take a moment to comment on the post. That is the hardest part.  Publishing comments takes this to a whole new level.

It takes a while to adjust to what is considered spam and what is not.  Some comments are obvious spam like comments, and most writers know those ones right away, the ones which say “great post, and come and see my website.” Then there are ones which come from a person who is a brand new reader who makes a wonderful comment and then you need to choose if you should publish that comment.  For the most part, if the link seems to be of some use to a reader I am willing to let it pass, however if it’s to a website which is “under construction” or anything else, I am more likely to delete the comment, because under blogger I can not cut out the link. (Update August 2015: Living a Life of Writing is now on WordPress and we can delete links out of comments as needed and keep the comment published.)

Still it is a small price to pay for peace of mind, as often people do read comments.

When people see that many comments are simply self-promotion, this looks bad on your writing.  When people see that while you might take the time to respond to your blog posts, and when you are writing blogs, you have to be aware of the power of moderation, you can not simply have the best first draft.  You can not simply have a billion dollar blog post, and the rest.  What you are looking for is comments and then the style of comments given,  Don’t delete a comments just because it suggests something which goes against your sensibilities, or tells you there is a mistake, or mistakes in a blog post it’s all about learning to grow as a writer.

There is more to writing blogs than just writing and publishing a post.  It’s about actually taking the time to see what will be the best policy when it comes to publishing or not publishing comments, on this blog I’ve made a point of saying that spam comments, or commenting with your links added will be deleted.  I can then tell very quickly who is commenting for a link, and who is not, and simply has a great thing to say.  It’s all about being open to change and to build relationships with your readers, and if one comes back to read more, and they see that you’ve responded in kind, they will feel pleased, and are more likely to comment again.  You simply have to know and avoid comments which are shameless in their self-promotion.

Now I’ll throw this one out: How do you deal with comments that you find really honestly are either nothing to do with a post, or are “everywhere” or are an attack against someone (a personal attack or insulting…) Do you believe in comment moderation, or deletion?