Ask Paul: September 17 (Premium)

On this episode of Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy, no wait. It’s Friday, so here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.
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christophercollins asks:

Comments here are turning into 'get of my lawn' type comments. While I understand everyone has an opinion, most of them end up commenting without even reading or following links in your articles. I love your writing and I try to ignore them. I've been a Windows user since 2.0 on DOS on my Tandy 1000. I build PC's for both work and home and have for 25 or more years. I am following along and updating with the times like what I would consider any 'tech' or 'enthusiast' would do. Sometimes I feel like you could name this site. The comments with people not taking the time to understand OS changes or even why it's happening are somewhat ridiculous at this point. Any thoughts? Ways to improve it? Sometimes I'm helpful. I'd hate to just block the comments altogether. Too much 'tech hate' on here for whatever reason... More so with non premium users.

Yeah. The comments here have always been a shitshow, frankly, and while it’s probably no different on similar sites, it’s still troubling. I’ve spent a lot of time on comment moderation in the past, but the sheer weight of the uniformed stupidity, tunnel-visioned opinions, and other nonsense is just too much for me. So in the past few months, I’ve scaled that back dramatically and now moderate comments quite differently.

This is a bit hard to explain because it’s kind of a back-end task, but what I used to do was go into the (WordPress-based) management dashboard and view the comments in reverse chronological order (new to old) until I hit the last comment that I had previously moderated (usually the day before but sometimes earlier that day). This gave me complete exposure to all of the comments---whether they’re from a new post or a two-year-old post, or whatever---and good control over spam comments (when I would then also go to the Users interface and remove those spam accounts). But it was also laborious, psychologically terrible and tiring, and sort of disconnected in that I wasn’t seeing comments in the context of whatever thread they were in.

So I don’t do that anymore. Instead, what I typically do now is look at the home page and Ctrl-click on the comments for all the previous day’s posts and then a few more from the day before that. Then, I can view/moderate all of the new comments in tabs together and in context, which is helpful, and it’s a quicker and less painful process. What I miss are comments on older posts and potentially some spam comments. But if anyone is seeing that kind of thing, obviously I’ll take action when alerted.

Since you are a Premium member, it may help to know that from my perspective, the Premium comments tend to be of much higher quality than non-Premium comments. And that, on a related noted, because of a DDoS attack (in August, I think) we ...

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