Kill-filing repeatedly abusive commentors

This is advice for fellow blog administrators. If you don’t have admin privileges to the comment moderation utility on a blog, then ignore this post.

Many bloggers (feminist bloggers are a favourite target) get targeted by gits who like to pile up abusive comments on many posts, even when they know they’ve been put into permanent moderation, because they get a kick out of the idea of the blogger(s) reading the comments anyway. It’s hatespam. If you have email notification for posts in moderation, then you get the abuse sent to your email, a thought which they also love. It’s a particularly insidious form of cyberbullying, with the goal of intimidation and silencing of voices that bother them.

The first answer to controlling such comments is to enable the options where comments are only autopublished if that commentor supplies an email address and has had a previously approved comment (more on that later). That will catch any new gits posting abuse to your blog. Then killfiling (aka blacklisting* or spaminating) the malfeasants bypasses the moderation queue entirely – usually sending them to the spam bucket. The instructions below are specifically for WordPress users (com and org) but other platforms should allow similar kill-filing (if not, I suggest you change to a more flexible blogging platform – there are several).

A note on the Shakesville crossposts

The various posts of Melissa’s that are being cross-posted as Feminism Friday posts all originally had extensive comments threads associated with them on Shakesville. Since the introduction of Shakesville‘s new commenting system (replacing Haloscan with Disqus) the links to the original Haloscan comments threads no longer appear on the Shakesville posts, although the Haloscan threads do still exist off in their orphaned section of cyberspace.

Housekeeping

I’ve made a few minor revisions to the following pages:

• Please Read This First
• Why was I sent to this blog?

The revisions add some material (mostly footnotes) to make it clear that that someone might be sent here by feminists to find basic theory information simply because that’s exactly what they’ve asked for (perhaps on their own blog rather than in a feminist forum), rather than only mentioning the option that it’s because they’ve been asking basic questions that disrupt a feminist forum.

I’ve also rearranged the sidebar so that the pointer to our Comments Policy is directly above the “Recent Comments” module in the left-hand sidebar, to make it more obvious that reading more than just a single FAQ that has been linked to is expected before commenting on any post.

Any other suggestions on improving the information architecture?