Dealing with inappropriate comments is something I’m quite familiar with as I have to moderate them regularly at work. We often have members writing reviews or commenting on reviews in an inappropriate way. It might be a case of their breaching our Fair Play Policy, or the website’s Conditions of Use. It’s not always on purpose, either, so we try to educate our users in order to reduce the number of instances when inappropriate comments come up.

We’re lucky enough to have a content verification system that does most of the work for us. It picks up on particular keywords and phrases and will temporarily retract content until one of our staff members can manually verify it. Members also have the ability to flag content they believe is suspect and/or inappropriate in some way so that it can be investigated.

Most bloggers are not so lucky, and will need to manually check all of the comments that are posted to their blog for spam and/or inappropriate content. That being said, it’s not actually too daunting of a task. A very large percentage of bloggers probably won’t get much traffic, let alone comments or user activity. Spam will still slip through, though, and trolls are everywhere, so it’s good to have a strategy in place to deal with any issues that may arise.

The strategy and guidelines that I will implement for my own blog are informed by my experience both at work, and as a long-time blogger and forum user. My strategy is as follows:

1. Install a plugin that can help with comment moderation. The Akismet plugin is recommended for WordPress blogs, as it was developed specifically for them and (from my own experience) works pretty well.
2. At the end of every blog post, add a ‘call to action’ and ask readers to comment on the topics raised in the post (because if you’ve got no comments then there is no point in having a comment strategy!)
3. When moderating comments:
   • Is the comment blatant spam? Delete it
   • Has someone commented on the article but used it as a backhanded way to link to their own blog/website?¹ Delete it
   • Does the comment contain profanity, personal attacks or other inappropriate content? Delete it
   • Does the comment appear to be legitimate but off-topic? Use personal judgement and either approve or delete it on a case-by-case basis
   • Everything else is probably fine and can be approved.
4. Respond to the comment (it helps when your blog theme allows nested comments) and thank the visitor for taking the time to contribute. Don’t forget to address any questions they may have raised as well.

It’s pretty simple, but it should do the job!

^{1. This is a tough one. Some people use this method to build traffic to their own blog and/or work on their SEO. I don’t feel that this kind of commenting makes a genuine contribution to a community and so, personally, I wouldn’t approve the comment.}