Monday, January 21, 2013

Blog Moderation Techniques

Okay, this is awesome. :) How does one handle jerkwad commenters? Sure, you can delete their posts, but certain practitioners of gluteal haberdashery are annoyingly persistent. What to do?

John Scalzi (a big-name SF writer, for anyone not into SF) has a ridiculously popular blog and doesn't shy away from controversial topics. I generally agree with him, so in my world he's a good guy, but there are folks out there who disagree with him strongly on various matters. If they're willing to be civil then all is well, but certain individuals come sliming and frothing their way onto his blog, spraying putrid stupidity all over the curtains. His usual response is to delete them (using the Mallet of Loving Correction -- some SF fans actually gave him a real one at WorldCon, like a fancy judge's mallet but about three feet long) but some folks, when their comments have been malleted, just keep coming back over and over. Handling them is annoying and takes up time.

So he borrowed a technique from blogger Jenny Lawton, in a move one of his commenters called "setting the Mallet to 'Kitten.'" It made me laugh, and after a couple of kittenings, a recent jerkwad couldn't take it anymore and vanished, yay!

I only wish I had 1/100 the blog traffic Scalzi does. My current jerkwad visitors are all comment spammers; moving up to active asshats would be an indication that my blog had achieved a new level of readership, so I'd actually kind of welcome that, at least as an indicator of popularity. [wry smile] Right now, I don't even need a Mallet, much less one with a "Kitten" setting. When/if I ever do, though, I'll keep it in mind. [snicker]

Check out the Kitten setting.

Angie

4 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Ok, I'm intrigued. Going to check it out.

Angie said...

Charles -- enjoy. :)

Angie

Suzan Harden said...

I was wondering why you shut down comments on your last post. And yes, kittening is the way to handle a troll. *grin*

But I'm like you, I only get the spammers.

Angie said...

Some spammer decided my blog is a great place to back up a truck and dump a bazillion spams. Just keeping up with them is getting to be a pain. :/ Blogger blocks most of them, but occasionally one gets through so I have to check all of them to see whether there's something I need to delete by hand. It's getting very annoying.

On Wordpress, I have it set to automatically close posts to comments after two weeks, so I only have to police the recent posts. Blogger doesn't have that setting -- or not that I've found -- so I have to decide to shut down comments on individual posts now and then. This is getting ridiculous, though. [mutter]

At least kittening trolls would be entertaining. :P

Angie