Throwing Unapproved Comments Overboard
Posted by mac33 on April 14, 2009
Like others, my lenses get a variety of guestbook comments. Unfortunately some of them aren’t lens worthy…spam, profanity or flaming other commenters mostly…so they don’t get approved.
Years ago, when Squidoo rolled out the Guestbook module, I chose to keep any comments that I didn’t approve in pending status as a record of what had been submitted. Yeah, I can be a pack rat…hate to throw stuff away in case it has a use someday. And I like to keep stats on things.
What use could keeping unapproved comments around have? Entertainment value mostly. It’s funny sometimes to scroll through and see the lame spam attempts. But the annoyance of having to scroll through them every time I want to approve a comment now outweighs any entertainment value.
I just counted and my dashboard shows a total of 73 unapproved comments dating back to June, 2007. 40 of them are from other lensmasters, the rest from anonymous visitors. I’m tempted to keep the ones from other lensmasters because I have used those to decide whether to ban someone from commenting if they continually post spam…but that wouldn’t reduce the scrolling issue much.
So I’m clearing out the bilge and getting rid of these worthless relics.
Does anyone else keep unapproved comments around…or do you toss them immediately?
(Rereading this post reminded me of the AT&T wireless commercials about the unused rollover minutes.)
April 15th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I toss’em. Funny, I can remember when I did not know what to do if the same person submitted the same comment two or three times (when the system wasn’t working properly.) It felt bad to delete them.
Brenda
April 16th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I definitely not a pack rat. I delete them. I’ve even had to delete comments when commentors started fighting amongst themselves…geez. It just got ugly and it sounded like it was related to a real world legal battle.
May 3rd, 2009 at 2:12 am
I approve or delete as soon as I am notified. My mind works in an orderly, step-by-step manner. I feel better acting right away and moving on to my other tasks.
Ryan