A Long time to comment

[secretwifelee]

I have tried making some replies and comments. How long does it usually take to get approved? Is this the normal way now?

 

[BeechLeaf]

Comments are moderated, and they take roughly a day before they actually appear on the story. People who have made a lot of comments eventually get the power to do it instantly, without moderation. (It is unclear what the criteria are.)

 

[ElectricBlue]

Comments are moderated, and they take roughly a day before they actually appear on the story. People who have made a lot of comments eventually get the power to do it instantly, without moderation. (It is unclear what the criteria are.)

With me, it was time rather than the number of comments. I'm not a prolific commenter, but I am a (fairly) constant writer, which might have something to do with it.

"Moderated" is the wrong term - that implies content moderation, but so far as I'm aware, the site scans for spam and html links off site, that's all. Content moderation is left to authors, who can delete comments using whatever criteria they choose. On occasion, the site runs a hate content filter and will remove offensive comments if authors haven't already. You can also report a comment, and the site will consider other comments from the same account and might do a block removal, or implement a ban.

 

[qidniz]

the site scans for spam and html links off site, that's all.

Why this is not automated is a continuing mystery. Yet another one of the "policies" the site has to increase busy work for themselves. (Spam, in the original sense of multi-posting simultaneously - like Cc-ing in mail - is not possible to begin with, while laboriously repeating the same message hardly seems worthwhile; and in the evolved sense of nuisance links, filtering them is trivial.)

 

[ElectricBlue]

Why this is not automated is a continuing mystery. Yet another one of the "policies" the site has to increase busy work for themselves. (Spam, in the original sense of multi-posting simultaneously - like Cc-ing in mail - is not possible to begin with, while laboriously repeating the same message hardly seems worthwhile; and in the evolved sense of nuisance links, filtering them is trivial.)

Back when comments screening started (about ten years ago IIRC) it was a batch process, run daily, then more frequently. I suspect it still is, but trusted account holders get an immediate release of their comments.

It's a legacy process, but the site knows it works, so why change it? Why people do spam attacks, who knows, but when they first happened, the site almost ground to a halt.

Like most of the seemingly odd technical things Lit does, there's usually context that recent arrivals don't know about. Also, the site has evolved over decades now, it's not an out-of-the-box system that some people seem to expect.

 

[Lucas_Plushka]

Is this the normal