Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy
Table of contents for Blog comments
Whether you’re struggling with spam comments, spammy commenter names or abusive comments, a comment policy is a useful tool to protect your blog. With a comment policy in place, you will probably still have to manually monitor and moderate your comments, but if anyone is ever offended by any comment-related decision you make, you can point to your comment policy as your “fall back.”
Elements of Good Comment Policy
A good comment policy outlines what kinds of comments and signatures you’ll allow on your blog. It also includes information on what you’ll do about comments (and people) that violate these policies. For example:
- Will you allow a commenter to put ‘keywords’ (words or phrases they want to rank in search engines for) in their ‘name’?
- Will you allow a commenter to drop a link to their blog at the end of their comments (a ‘link signature’)?
- Will you allow comments that are less than kind—to you or to others?
- Will you allow comments that are out-and-out mean or abusive—to you or to others?
- Will you block someone for violating these policies?
- Will you delete comments that violate these policies?
- Will you edit comments that violate these policies?
- Will you notify a commenter before/after acting on your policy?
Finally, you should probably reserve the right to edit, delete and otherwise exercise your editorial discretion over comments left on your blog. Also, state that you’re not responsible, legally or otherwise, for comments left on your blog.
Good Examples of Comment Policies
Some of my favorite comment policies:
Marketing Pilgrim
ProBlogger
eMoms at Home
All of these policies outline what kind of comments are welcome and what kind are not, as well as actions that will be taken against comments that do not meet the guidelines. Also for your reference, you can see the MamaBlogga Comment Policy.
Again, having a comment policy won’t prevent spam or mean comments on your blog, but if anyone ever asks you why their comment was deleted or edited, you can point to your policy as the reason.
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I know people hate those captchas but they work so well . . .
I think mombloggers in general have tamer commenters than on other blogs but it’s a good reminder to hear this. Thanks.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:47 amthanks – this was great. i wrote a policy and set it up on my blog.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:05 pm[...] can read how to “Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy” on MamaBlogga. I’ve put it on my to-do list and will write one, when I find the [...]
November 16th, 2007 at 7:19 pmI love this idea.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:52 pmDon’t be surprised if I write about it and the RE.net comes a looking here…
[...] came across MomaBlogga’s post “Protect Your Blog With A Comment Policy“. After carefully reading the bullet points, I realized the true value of having my own [...]
June 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm