Comment spam, moved to Disqus

So I got a question about why I would enable comments on my blog but not accept to have it unmoderated. It is a valid question, so I thought I should comment.

In principle I believe that for conversations in comments to evolve into those good conversations we need to be able to have freedom of expression and be able to respond to other people as the conversation is evolving. If too much time passes the chance of people participating drop, and the potential usefulness of the conversation disappear.

What I saw previously was a comment section growing out of control. Spam snuck past all the checks faster than I could delete them, and what started as great comments and conversations was reduced to almost nothing compared to the “negative value” comments. This was clearly a situation I could not accept.

Enabling unmoderated comments is something I did consider for this new blog, but thinking back at how the comment-section for posts evolved when I had it unmoderated on WordPress made me think that the best thing for all parties would be to enable commenting, but also enforce moderation.

What struck me now was that I have not tried to run comments unmoderated through Disqus which I now use for comments, and I really have no idea how good they are at filter out unwanted content. Since I do not yet know, I have decided to enable commenting again, just to see how it turns out. Starting out I will not accept comments from what Disqus define as “guests” (I’m assuming this means non-verified / not logged in users), but comments from everyone else will go through unmoderated. Posting links and images in the comments will also be accepted. If all goes well for a while I will probably enable guest commenting as well.

Hopefully good things will come out of this experiment.