How Comments Work

People who browse the internet are very different. They have different personalities, worldviews, and life goals. Without a doubt, this is a wonderful and interesting thing that sparks in us a desire to communicate with one another. However, unfortunately, there are also those specimens of the human race who, having gotten their hands on the World Wide Web and feeling a sense of impunity, begin pouring all their problems onto the pages of websites — the fruits of their sense of personal unfulfillment and other such mental quirks. It is these methods of dealing with unruly visitors and their outpourings in the comments section that we will be discussing next.

I considered providing a couple of examples, but ultimately decided not to traumatize the delicate sensibilities of our readers — besides, half the words in such comments would have had to be bleeped out anyway, so you still wouldn't get the full force and richness of those expressions :)

So, how does one prevent unwanted comments from appearing on the pages of one's website? There are several methods of moderation. Dal's Dictionary doesn't know the word, so I'll explain it as best I can myself. Moderation is the process of enforcing the rules established within a given website. There are two types: post-moderation and pre-moderation.

With post-moderation, the editor makes a decision after the message has already been published and seen by everyone. This approach requires constant monitoring for new comments and a prompt response.

Pre-moderation makes it possible to prevent unflattering content from being published before it is approved by a moderator, but this method often confuses well-meaning commenters. It's not clear where the comment I just wrote has gone. Sometimes people even write it again, and it still doesn't appear. As a result, this approach only drives people away from the site.

We use author-based pre-moderation. This means the author can see their own freshly written comment, which lets them be confident that the message was successfully delivered to its recipient. Other visitors to the site will see it only after a moderator approves it. This system occasionally has a hiccup — if approval hasn't been granted yet and the user visits again from a different computer or reconnects to the internet and their IP address changes — but there's really nothing to be done about that short of registering on the site.

Do you, like me, dislike having to register on every single website out there?

Author: Alexey Khaletsky