If You Moderate Comments Using Email, Mark The Spam Properly

One evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, comes from blog owners who are moderating comments, to their blogs, using comment moderation email.

I am constantly assailed by spam comments, being published to my blog, delivered to my Inbox! Is there anything I can do, about the spam, except just keep deleting?

Comment moderation, using email, offers several choices for action - but only one action will have any actual effect upon the spam.

When you moderate comments using email, and you are using comment moderation email - not comment notification email, you'll have the same choices for comment moderation, as when you use the Blogger dashboard wizard.

• Publish
• Delete
• Mark as spam

You'll have an additional choice, too.

• Moderate comments for this blog.

The latter choice gives you - when you are properly logged in to Blogger - quick access to the dashboard Comments wizard, to moderate from there.

As with using the dashboard wizard, the choice here is crucial. You need to mark spam comments as Spam. If you delete, the comment goes away - and nothing is done to train the spam filters. Spam comments, deleted, will simply let the spammer continue to annoy you.

With email messages, there are two more actions which some people take - and neither will do anything, directly, about comment spam.

• Some people will delete the email message - and this simply removes the email message, and the emailed copy of the spam, from the Inbox.
• Other people will use the "Spam" email mark. This selection is used to train the email comment filters - but it will only indirectly train the comment spam filters.

Neither deleting the email message, nor marking the email message as spam, will do anything about comment spam.

If you're looking at the comment notification email message, you'll have no comment moderation choices. Here, your only choice will be to delete the email message - if you're concerned with Inbox capacity. You can't moderate, using comment notification email.

Marking an email message, containing a spam comment, as spam - whether you are viewing the comment moderation or comment notification email message - accomplishes nothing. When you mark an email message as spam, you're reporting the sender of the email message. With comment moderation or comment notification email, marking an email message as spam reports the Blogger comment forwarding wizard - and this does nothing about the originator of the spam comment.

Use email to moderate comments, if you like. It's a convenient way to quickly moderate comments - and for some, more convenient than the Blogger dashboard. But make the right choices, when moderating.

>> Top