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Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy

Table of contents for Blog comments

Whether you’re struggling with spam comments, spammy commenter names or abusive comments, a comment policy is a useful tool to protect your blog. With a comment policy in place, you will probably still have to manually monitor and moderate your comments, but if anyone is ever offended by any comment-related decision you make, you can point to your comment policy as your “fall back.”

Elements of Good Comment Policy

A good comment policy outlines what kinds of comments and signatures you’ll allow on your blog. It also includes information on what you’ll do about comments (and people) that violate these policies. For example:

  • Will you allow a commenter to put ‘keywords’ (words or phrases they want to rank in search engines for) in their ‘name’?
  • Will you allow a commenter to drop a link to their blog at the end of their comments (a ‘link signature’)?
  • Will you allow comments that are less than kind—to you or to others?
  • Will you allow comments that are out-and-out mean or abusive—to you or to others?
  • Will you block someone for violating these policies?
  • Will you delete comments that violate these policies?
  • Will you edit comments that violate these policies?
  • Will you notify a commenter before/after acting on your policy?

Finally, you should probably reserve the right to edit, delete and otherwise exercise your editorial discretion over comments left on your blog. Also, state that you’re not responsible, legally or otherwise, for comments left on your blog.

Good Examples of Comment Policies

Some of my favorite comment policies:
Marketing Pilgrim
ProBlogger
eMoms at Home

All of these policies outline what kind of comments are welcome and what kind are not, as well as actions that will be taken against comments that do not meet the guidelines. Also for your reference, you can see the MamaBlogga Comment Policy.

Again, having a comment policy won’t prevent spam or mean comments on your blog, but if anyone ever asks you why their comment was deleted or edited, you can point to your policy as the reason.

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7 replies on “Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy”

I know people hate those captchas but they work so well . . .

I think mombloggers in general have tamer commenters than on other blogs but it’s a good reminder to hear this. Thanks.

I got the same problem. The comment sounds so uplifting but I am very keen to my commenter as to their posts. I copy the whole comment and paste it on the search bar, undoubtedly I got a spam comment. Now, I am using Akismet on my wordpress blogs, not sure with other plugins. If these spammers use bots, yeah captcha tech really helps. However, if these spammers are humans with 20/20 vision i don’t think so…Comment policy is a good option!

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