I’ve decided. Community is all about the face to face

Recently as part of my work with Wannabe Hacks I went to Kingston University to talk with their journalism society about entrepreneurial journalism.

The experience was enlightening in many ways and I learnt much about what fellow students think about the state of journalism. The thing which really struck me was how much more profitable it was to interact with people face-to-face.

Comment moderation – a regular dilemma for community managers

Following on from the point raised by Martin Caparrota on moderating comments I wanted to raise this issue in relation the sites I run and the impact moderation has on the community.

With Pope and Swift comments on posts are sporadic. Often we can post ten times and not get anything more than a pingback or Twitter notification. This is often due to the nature of the topic, everyone knows about sport and everyone writes about sport. But occasionally, mainly thanks to well-timed posts with exaggerated SEO we get an influx of comments, quite often negative ones.

And when I say negative I do not mean a critical point about the blog post or the topic at hand, these are always approved, but instead just one line with some pretty obscene language. These are not hard to deal with, they go straight in the trash. I did once find myself considering whether to approve a comment which cited male genitalia just to take the comments total into double figures but I resisted temptation.