comment moderation turnaround time on Launchpad News

Asked by HughBranes

[perhaps not strictly launchpad - still seems best option]

What is the expected turnaround time for comments to be moderated on the Launchpad News site (http://news.launchpad.net) ? I made a comment there something like five days ago - no confirmation, no rejection, and no published comment. I am starting to wonder if it's disappeared into the etherweb.

I think a little bit of expectation management for submitters is always useful, in any case. For example, "your comment will be moderated within 24 hours", "we will inform you by email if your comment is rejected", "your tracking number is X", "an email has been sent to <email address hidden> to confirm your comment". It depends how much you're really interested in an engaging dialogue, I guess.

Happy to expand or spec something up.

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English Edit question
Status:
Solved
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Launchpad itself Edit question
Assignee:
Joey Stanford Edit question
Solved by:
Joey Stanford
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Revision history for this message
Best Joey Stanford (joey) said :
#1

Hi Hugh,

Due to some security concerns our system admins have with comment spam blockers, we unfortunately have none installed. We have an outstanding request for this to them. If these were installed we could allow automatic posting of comments but since it's not, 99.9% of the comments are spam so we don't. Instead we manually go through the 600 or so comments that come in per day, usually once or twice a week, and weed out the spam ones.

So, one of two things can happen: 1) it takes us a while to week through the 1000s of spam items to find a good comment and approve it, 2) a good comment inadvertently could get picked up by some of the filters we have in place to catch spam (although I know of no such circumstance.).

At this time, I believe the correct action is to keep pushing for something like askimet to be installed which happens on our end.

Joey

Revision history for this message
HughBranes (hughbranes) said :
#2

Cheers Joey - I guess this explains it. Thanks for fishing my comment out, though it looks a little clueless following Bruce's, since I hadn't seen his when I posted it.

I think possibly you should close comments until you get an akismet or such like - either that or you need to put text there to manage expectations a little better. It's pretty annoying making a comment and thinking it has vanished, and it seems like there's no real dialogue with this kind of turnaround. It's more a broadcast, which is fine if marked as such.

Perhaps if you integrate it with main LP accounts you might not have so many bots? (or at least provide that option so that you can greenlight account holders automatically).

I'll mark this solved, but I think there are things to do here. Let me know if you want more suggestions or detail.

Cheers

Revision history for this message
HughBranes (hughbranes) said :
#3

Thanks Joey Stanford, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
Joey Stanford (joey) said :
#4

Hi Hugh,

>Perhaps if you integrate it with main LP accounts you might not have so many bots? (or at least provide that option so >that you can greenlight account holders automatically)

Yes in fact we have an activity to extend the WP OpenID module to talk to Launchpad to do just this! No date on it though.

Out of 91 pages of Spam I fished out 4 good comments. :-)

J