Comment moderation?

maedhros21

Experienced
Joined
Mar 28, 2011
Posts
35
I am curious when comment review started here on Lit. I have no problem with it because sometimes the hate trolls can post anything they want about an authors stories. But I posted a comment tonight and it is pending moderator approval before posting....is this a new thing or has it been ongoing for awhile.
 
I believe it was implemented to stall/block the surge of spam comments authors were getting on their stories from "Maria" and other advertisements looking for a mature man. I don't think a human is "moderating" the comments of humans, but rather a robot is screening them to see if they match another obvious robot.

But that's what I heard.

My complaint is that if I make a comment, half the time it appears to have been cut off (only half of it is visible), even though, say it was a reply-comment to a comment on my own story, I can see the full comment I submitted on my Author Dashboard.

So...very buggy regardless.
 
It started about 6 - 8 weeks ago in response to Spam hitting story comment files. As Etaski notes, it's more likely a spam finder bot than a real human being, looking for text with emails and web links. It takes about fifteen minutes (based on a reply I made to a comment on one of my stories) to check and publish.

Authors still have the ability to delete any comment received.

Note - Laurel has always been able to delete any comment made, at any time.

This is the first I've heard about text truncation, though.
 
Sounds right

I think you've hit on it. The truncation of comments is troubling, but the effort is laudable.

I only notice the message appear in the evening, when I presume traffic is higher, slowing down the filter. If you notice your comments being truncated, I would report that to Laurel.
 
Oh, and update on the truncating comment... :D It's been resolved but took me a bit to come back around.

I did report the last truncated comment, Laurel and Manu did look into it, and it was a fairly simple trigger:

I like using <3 now and again, because some readers just deserve a few hearts.

The brackets were causing the truncation as something in the comments section was trying to process HTML.

As they don't want the comments section doing this, Manu poked at it. I haven't tried it again yet, but given he commented on my story four times one day then stopped (leaving not a trace behind, like Batman), I'm figuring he was satisfied with the fix. :D
 
Oh, and update on the truncating comment... :D It's been resolved but took me a bit to come back around.

I like using <3 now and again, because some readers just deserve a few hearts.
Love and the Truncated Comment - that's a story title, right there :).

Thanks for the update, glad it's fixed. We can't have truncated comments (sounds like something an elephant would leave).
 
To resurrect this thread, I've been mildly frustrated by the time delay for comments to appear -- in my case, it took about six hours for one of mine to make it through. Would it make more sense to let story authors manually approve pending comments? This shouldn't replace the current, presumably automated system, but augment it. Instead of having a central authority (whether a computer algorithm or a site admin) being the sole responsible party, I think story authors should have the opportunity to review pending comments on their stories and check the "yeah, this one's okay" button, bypassing the usual process.

A solution like this would save time: story authors probably aren't going to approve obviously spam comments on their stories (and, indeed, could perhaps delete them before they appear -- they already have the opportunity to curate comments on their stories, so it's a logical next step). If the story author is inactive or otherwise non-responsive, the automated computer algorithm will eventually get to the comment and approve it the usual way. This isn't a site-breaking issue, and it'd probably take awhile to code and implement, but I think it's an interesting idea, and would greatly streamline things.
 
To resurrect this thread, I've been mildly frustrated by the time delay for comments to appear -- in my case, it took about six hours for one of mine to make it through. Would it make more sense to let story authors manually approve pending comments? This shouldn't replace the current, presumably automated system, but augment it. Instead of having a central authority (whether a computer algorithm or a site admin) being the sole responsible party, I think story authors should have the opportunity to review pending comments on their stories and check the "yeah, this one's okay" button, bypassing the usual process.

A solution like this would save time: story authors probably aren't going to approve obviously spam comments on their stories (and, indeed, could perhaps delete them before they appear -- they already have the opportunity to curate comments on their stories, so it's a logical next step). If the story author is inactive or otherwise non-responsive, the automated computer algorithm will eventually get to the comment and approve it the usual way. This isn't a site-breaking issue, and it'd probably take awhile to code and implement, but I think it's an interesting idea, and would greatly streamline things.
Except not all authors would do the policing and approving, and we'd be back where we started (with Maria wanting to offer her world). Also, authors have no control over the timing of comments, so a bot solves that. Also also, my day is the night before in America - your proposal sort of forgets different time zones.

Besides, a comment is a comment, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get through the filters, does it?
 
Of course, not all authors would be so prompt, in which case the comment would wend its way through the system. I just kinda figured it might be useful to distribute the load of comment moderation, just in case.
 
Does anyone have any idea how long it takes for a comment to appear it's been over 24 hours since I posted a comment but it is still not appearing. Is it in moderation or has it been rejected how do I check?
 
Does anyone have any idea how long it takes for a comment to appear it's been over 24 hours since I posted a comment but it is still not appearing. Is it in moderation or has it been rejected how do I check?
As noted above, the comment "moderation" is an automated process that purges comments with active links or is spam. It's a batch process - the longest I've seen is about eight hours (test messages on my own stories). To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to check status.

Keep in mind, the author can delete comments as soon as they see them, so that's a possibility.
 
Very occasionally I see delays longer than 24 hours.

The comment I was talking about got posted. Another comment by someone anonymous appeared just after mine. Maybe bot was taking longer because there were two maybe more comments to moderate on one story. Actually the author asked for emails to a character in the story that might be mentioned in the next chapter so there was a flood of comments maybe that's why moderation took that long.
 
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