e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Improving the E.politics Comment Process

October 17th, 2007

I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the comment policy on this site, so let’s take this fine Fall morning to make an arbitrary executive decision. The problem is that because of comment-spam, and despite a good spam filter, enough crap slips through every day that I’ve kept the system set to require site administrator approval for all comments. When you add a note to a story, until it’s approved, you can see your comment (tagged as “waiting for approval”) but no one else can. While this policy helps keep the spam under control, it doesn’t exactly make for live conversation, particularly if I’m off gallivanting around instead of checking my email to see if new comments have arrived.

So here’s the new policy, based on an incredibly exacting (two whole minutes!) review of the options available in this installation of Wordpress: once you submit a comment and have it approved, your future missives will sail directly into the pages of e.politics, unreviewed by human eyes other than your own. Your identity is tied to your email address, so as long as you use the same address every time, once you’ve been established as human rather than robot (not to discriminate against our metallic brethren), you can participate in any discussion in real-time. Any other suggestions for improvements? Send ‘em along.

– cpd

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