Inconsistency in informing commenters about comment moderation

  • Unknown's avatar
    enilamalenj · Member ·

    For WordPress.com blogs that have comment moderation enabled, I’ve noticed that some themes will automatically notify a commenter that his or her comment has been held for moderation, while other themes will not.

    For example, after submitting a comment on Ocean Mist, the message “Your comment is awaiting moderation” will be displayed next to the comment.

    In Tarski and Pool, no such message is displayed — the comment just appears as if there was no moderation.

    Because of this, I think that themes like Tarski and Pool are at a disadvantage when it comes to visitors’ user-friendliness. If some visitors leave comments on a moderated blog, it looks to them that the comment successfully went through. If they leave the blog then later return and see that their comment has disappeared, they may think that the webmaster has deleted or censored their comments when in fact they had simply not yet been approved. (Unapproved comments “disappear” when the commenters clear their WordPress.com cookies.)

    Needless to say, this can confuse and irritate visitors who spent time writing comments, and may be disadvantageous for the blog webmaster as well, who might be wrongly accused of trashing others’ comments.

    Thus, I suggest that all themes display the message “Your comment is awaiting moderation” for comment-moderated blogs.

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