Comment Moderation: Strategies for Managing User-Generated Content on Your Website

February 2023

#commenting

#Engagement

#moderation

Having a well-moderated comments section can be beneficial for both the publisher and the audience. 

However, this is not always the case. Trolls and bad actors often find ways to harm the quality of your content. Therefore, it is important for publishers to keep their user-generated content in check as well.

But how? 

In this blog, we covered all the details related to comment moderation and a few tools that should be useful for publishers.

Table of Contents

Why Comment Moderation is Important for Publishers?

Comment moderation is important for publishers because it allows them to maintain a safe and civil environment for readers to engage with content and with each other. 

Moderation can help to prevent spam, offensive language, and personal attacks, which can create a negative experience for readers and potentially drive them away. It also allows publishers to maintain control over the conversation and ensure that it stays on topic and relevant to the content. 

Additionally, by moderating comments, publishers can also reduce the risk of legal issues arising from defamatory or libelous statements made by commenters.

How Should Publishers Moderate Comments On Their Pages?

There are several ways that publishers can moderate comments on their pages:

Manual moderation: Publishers can manually review and approve or reject comments before they are posted. This allows for a high level of control, but can be time-consuming and may not be practical for sites with a high volume of comments.

Automated moderation: Publishers can use software or algorithms to automatically filter comments based on certain criteria, such as keywords or phrases. This can help to quickly identify and remove spam or offensive comments, but it may also inadvertently remove legitimate comments.

Community moderation: Publishers can also allow readers to flag or report comments that they find inappropriate, and have a team of moderators review and remove those comments.

Third-Party Moderation: Publishers can also use third-party moderation services, they can handle the moderation process and keep the comments section safe and clean.

Combination of above: Publishers can also use a combination of the above methods to moderate comments, for example using automated moderation to filter out obvious spam and then manually reviewing the remaining comments.

It’s important to note that each publisher should find the best approach that suits their needs and audience, and also comply with any legal requirements such as COPPA, GDPR, and other regulations.

Top Comment Moderation Tools

There are several comment moderation tools that publishers can use to help manage and moderate comments on their pages. Some examples include:

Insticator Commenting

We are a leading website commenting tool provider. Publishers can Insticator commenting to integrate comments across multiple platforms and provides moderation features such as the ability to flag, approve, or reject comments. We use a combination of manual and AI moderation techniques to help allow only quality comments on your pages.

Akismet

This is a popular spam filtering plugin for websites that uses advanced algorithms to automatically detect and block spam comments. If you use WordPress, this can come in handy for you. However, this one is recommended for small publishers.

Facebook Comments

Facebook Comments is another plugin that can be used to enable and moderate comments for publishers. This tool takes the Facebook id of the commenter. You can moderate comments through the Facebook app or through a browser.

Additional Benefits of Insticator Commenting

Unlike Akismet and Facebook Comments, Insticator Commenting is a premium tool that comes with additional features:

1. Premium look and feel: We designed our product to enhance the user experience of your pages. 

2. No effect on page loading speed: We make sure to keep the size of our tool in check so it doesn’t affect page loading speed or disrupt core web vitals.

3. First-party data ownership: Users generally have to signup/log in to submit comments, it allows publishers to directly collect first-party data from their users.

4. Best-in-class comment moderation: We use a combination of manual and AI moderation techniques to keep trolls and bad actors away. However, publishers are always free to manually allow/disallow comments from their dashboards.

5. Generate revenue: With our ad-supported model, publishers can generate unique incremental revenue from a historically under-monetized area on their sites through easy-to-implement video and display ads.

Choose Insticator Commenting as your website commenting tool to ensure that you’re getting the best out of your website and your users.

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Content Writer

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Content Writer