Do we need comment moderation?

The National Library has now been blogging for about 2 months. To date, Create Readers has 90 posts and 57 comments; LibraryTechNZ has 36 posts and 39 comments.

Comments are one of the things we're watching as we test the blogging waters. As I noted in an earlier post about setting up these blogs, we're pre-moderating comments on Create Readers (checking the comments when they are submitted, and publishing them ourselves) and post-moderating comments on this blog (comments are published as soon as they're submitted, and we check them afterwards).

The most-commented post on Create Readers is 'What book got you hooked', and on LibraryTechNZ it's 'The long(itude) and short on maps'. Both comment threads include comments from National Library staff, which do plump up the numbers a bit, but which are also replies to readers' questions or feedback. So far, we've rejected just one comment - an author who submitted a comment to Create Readers touting his books. One of the things we agreed before launching the blog was that it shouldn't function as an advertising site.

On the upside - we've not had any spamming. On the downside, our own spam filters seems to be blocking some of the comment notifications, which are sent from Blogger to a central email address and then forwarded on to various staff. This means we don't always publish or respond to comments as promptly as I'd like.

One of the things I find most interesting is that some people have used this blog - which is externally hosted - to let us know when they can't access other National Library sites. Now we're considering redirecting web visitors to a notification on this blog when we have a scheduled server outage.

Another thing that I know our Create Readers bloggers find really rewarding is the interaction that the commenting encourages - for example, on this post about Readergirlz, an American online book community. Create Readers gets more shout-outs like that; LibraryTechNZ comments tend to be queries or requests for more information (and the odd correction!).

Come the end of the year we'll be evaluating these blogs, and comment moderation is on the list of things to discuss. Although the experience has been overwhelmingly positive, I'll be recommending that we retain the moderation on Create Readers, as the blog is being used in class rooms.

To be frank, I've been overjoyed with the feedback we've received from readers; I was totally prepared to face up to a comment-desert come the end of the first 3 months of blogging. It's encouraging and motivating to know that people are getting something out of what we write.