Care in the Community
Read on for the latest news, features and happenings for ZDNet.co.uk members from your very own community editor.
Monday 28 September 2009, 5:46 PM
Disappearing comments and blog posts
One possibility is that the post has been sent to moderation by our spam filter. This scans posts for words matching a blacklist of terms frequently used by spammers. An editor will then review quarantined posts and if your post has been filtered in error, it will be pushed live. This can sometimes take a few hours, but we believe the delay is worth it to keep spam off the site.
We'll send you an email to let you know that this has happened, but if you want to follow up, send us an email at community.manager@zdnet.co.uk.
Alternatively, your post may have been removed from the site as it contravenes our Terms and Conditions or our Code of Conduct. Our goal with the community is to make it a place where you can share and read useful opinions and experiences, so we try to keep out marketing blurbs (including promotion of corporate events), PR pitches and advertising, for example.
We also ask our members to make sure their posts will appeal to IT pros (so not just about business technology, but also stuff that tech-savvy people will like, such as scientific breakthroughs or nifty gadgets). They should also be valuable -- so a post with just a URL may be removed -- and security is also a factor in this.
Basically, we're urging people to make comments that will further the discussion. If you post a one-word reaction, for example, we may remove this so that the thread doesn't get cluttered up. There are alternatives: If you're reading a story, you can always express your liking by choosing one of the 'Did you find this article useful?' icons. And if you're looking at a blog, why not drop the author a note via our internal messaging system?
Overall, we try to balance the interests of the community against those of the individual, and to correct the balance where needed. Of course, we're open to feedback on this: What do you think? Should we hide comments like 'Great!'? Or do members want to us to allow them and let the readers ignore them as they will?
Let me know what you think.
PreviousComments on this post
Hmmm.
There have been two or three occasions over the past 6 months where I have posted a simple comment that has disappeared without trace. As far as I can remember they were all on-topic conventional replies.
Ironically, on a couple of occasions where I was angry about a subject and half expected my comments to be removed, they weren't {shrug}
How about rankings and "activity meters" were they supposed to go inert as well?
Update: Rankings and activity meter is back. Everybody has been re-elevated above "newbie" again.
In the words of Emily Latilla (on NBC's Saturday Night Live, years ago) "Oh? Never mind!"
Yeah taking the filters into account I've also still had substantial comments disappear without a trace and have received no mails from automated systems etc, some things I've had go like little comments as expected but as tezzer has already stated I've had me moments and no action was taking.
But with regards to people just showing their appreciation to an article and leaving little comment as well as hitting the thumbs up button, yeah personally I don't see an issue with that.
With regards to spammers from what I have seen they tend to just setup an account and start broadcasting fake blogs/story titles, and once you get there its full of links.
This weekend's blitz of objectionable and potentially dangerous spam did get through and clutter up the community discussions! Why was this?
Thanks for the feedback.
@Tezzer: I'm not sure what happened to those comments that disappeared -- in addition to being under moderation, some comments may also have encountered a bug. If this happens again, please let us know, and we'll try to track down what's going on. As for your more heated comments, we believe these are fair enough, as long as you're not offensive or attacking someone personally.
@Xwindowsjunkie: Nope, that was a bug -- which the tech team has fixed (thanks, guys!)
@CA: If a member has posted several comments in a short space of time, we will quarantine some of these so that the community part of the site is not dominated by one member's remarks. We will then bring these live again once the page has a representative mix again, so check back later to see if your post is live. In this case, we don't have an automated message system.
@Moley: I'm sorry about that deluge of spam over the weekend. It's a war of attrition against spammers: They become familiar with blacklists, so we update our keywords for the filter, they adjust their content... What complicates this is that we have to balance the need to filter on words such as 'trainers' against the innocuous use of such words by members.
Over the weekend, we've fewer staff resources to dedicate to watching out for spam, so you may see more then. In general, it's a great help if readers use the '!Report as offensive' link to alert us to possible spam on Talkbacks and comments, to send it to editors for moderation.
If you want to provide feedback, just leave a comment here or you can always send me a private message via the messaging system. Thanks!
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