Blog Editor: Moderating Comments
Thursday, July 16, 2009
by Patrick Copeland
You might not know this but when we started this blog back in January 2007 we were the first at Google to allow readers to comment openly on our posts. We take pride in our goal to participate in the testing community.
This openness is sometimes abused. Lately the volume of comment spam has been on the raise. We have to spend a lot of time playing "whack-a-mole" cleaning it up. It's annoying to our readers and clutters the legitimate discussion.
We've taken the step to moderate comments starting today and will delete spam before you see it. Comments that are clearly spam or are purely promotional in nature will be filtered. The only down side is that comments will have a slight latency getting posted. We will continue to encourage debate and won't censor conflicting or alternative ideas.
Thanks for understanding. And keep up the rich discussion.
You might not know this but when we started this blog back in January 2007 we were the first at Google to allow readers to comment openly on our posts. We take pride in our goal to participate in the testing community.
This openness is sometimes abused. Lately the volume of comment spam has been on the raise. We have to spend a lot of time playing "whack-a-mole" cleaning it up. It's annoying to our readers and clutters the legitimate discussion.
We've taken the step to moderate comments starting today and will delete spam before you see it. Comments that are clearly spam or are purely promotional in nature will be filtered. The only down side is that comments will have a slight latency getting posted. We will continue to encourage debate and won't censor conflicting or alternative ideas.
Thanks for understanding. And keep up the rich discussion.
I applaud your approach to comments. If only other projects (like google reader) took such an approach then they could find out what an abomination their 'x users liked this' featurette would be.
ReplyDeleteVery nice, I also noticed the large amounts of spam in the comments, I'm glad I can now turn on "Email follow-up comments" on again! :)
ReplyDeleteGoogle is great except for the font size and type. Many people need large bold type to be able to read the text. The Google tool bar has options for changing font type and size but they do not work. Does any one have any suggestions regarding how I can increase the font and type in Google. Thanks in advance.
ReplyDeleteAny chance that someone could clean up the spam on earlier posts?
ReplyDelete@jd - I spent the night killing off all of the spam comment on the old posts. I think I got it all -- we are a clean blog now.
ReplyDelete