Faster Comment Moderation
Tonight we deployed a quick update that will hopefully save all of us Harmony bloggers a few minutes here and there, as well as help us keep our blogs free of spam and inappropriate comments. And it only took an hour to build.
The Problem
We use Defensio to check all comments for spam, but sometimes spam comments get through the checks. It’s the nature of blogging. Whenever a spam comment made it through Defensio, you had to log into the Harmony admin area, find the post, find the comment, and mark it as spam. Not a problem when you’re already in the system, but typically these comments come in when you’re busy doing something else. Stopping what you’re working on, switching tasks, and navigating through a heap of contexts that you don’t need to think about right now was annoying, and often times, we just couldn’t be bothered.
Because of this, spam comments were left and forgotten, and that’s just uncool. What we wanted was a quick, simple way to identify this comment as spam, delete it, and move on with my day. So that’s what we did.
The Solution
Now, we include a link at the end of every comment email that takes you to a page like this:
It’s focused and simple, allowing you to mark the particular comment as spam, and even close comments on the post, in a single action, and then return to whatever you were doing before. It now takes only seconds to keep you blog free of spam that sneaks by the filters.
We’re so excited about this feature because it’s going to save us time, energy, and make our own blogs better. We hope you like it too.
Have you guys considered preventing spammy comments? On FotoJournal we don’t allow a comment to even be posted if Defensio thinks it’s spam. That way the user doesn’t have to bother clearing out spam. So far we’ve had ~10,000 comments approved, and no reports (yet) of false positives.
Nonetheless, this is a great addition to Harmony. Keep rolling out the awesome :)
@Kyle: We are already checking comments with Defensio, and it catches nearly all of them, but occasionally a few slip through, and that’s where this feature comes into play.