A Better Way to Manage News Comments: Technology Evangelist

July 20th, 2007 by chuq

For those who don’t want to invest in proper moderation of things like discussion boards or comments, a compromise solution that works very well is trackbacks. Rather than allowing people to contribute to your site’s articles directly, give them credit for the comments they make about your articles on their own blogs. The quality of comments goes up tremendously in this situation since people are more accountable for their writing. Rather than leaving drive-by snarky comments, they’re writing for their regular audience and for the audience interested in the story on your news site (or blog).

I don’t agree with this. Here’s the problem: at least with blog comments, you can add authentication or CAPTCHAs or some kind of protection from spamming. Trackbacks, as they’re currently designed and implemented, are open and unprotected, and spammers have been using them for a while to try to spam links onto blogs.

Six Apart (among others) has started a process to update trackback standards and formalize them. I’m not sure what the current status is, honestly, but at least they’re trying to find a fix for this, but for now, trackbacks, unless you turn on full moderation (available in Typepad and I believe other platforms) and approve each one through, puts you at huge risk of trackback spam and getting your sites washed over by garbage, especially the porn and drug spammers.

I’ve gone back and forth from no trackbacks to open to moderated, looking for the best compromise. These days, I ahve them open but moderated, so I can look at them before they go live. Unfortunately, there’s no way with a trackback to add a CAPTCHA or TypeKey to allow them to go live without reivew in some cases, but that’s frankly a hassle, even for a relatively small site like mine.

Recommending that people leave trackbacks wide open is just giving them a timebomb that’ll go off when they least expect it, so suggesting they use trackbacks instead of comments doesn’t really solve the problem; they’re both open to spam, only trackbacks are MORE open to it right now.

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View Comments to “A Better Way to Manage News Comments: Technology Evangelist”

Chuq says:

July 20, 2007 at 3:53 pm

Technorati-based trackbacks are definitely better, but if folks use the standard blog trackback setup, they’re asking for problems.
And yes, people are more polite on their own blogs because they’re accountable, but trackbacks can also point to splogs and spam content, and that’s where trackbacks lose it.
chuq
Ed Kohler says:

July 20, 2007 at 3:44 pm

Hi Chuqui, thanks for picking up on my article. I think the Washington Post’s implementation works pretty well since Technorati is pretty aggressive when it comes to filtering blog spam.
Also, I believe Moveable Type and WordPress both have trackback moderation capabilities.
But the bigger point is that people tend to be more civil when they write on their own blogs than in comments since there is a bit more accountability for their opinions.