March 30, 2004

With the introduction of Typekey, the discussion of blog-comment validation and moderation has kicked into high gear.

I applaud the nice Six Apart people for doing something to turn back the tide of comment spam and crapflooding. And while I wouldn’t necessarily discourage anyone from using Typekey, I think we might be able to do better.

I’d like to see a social-networked, peer-to-peer, graduated comment-moderation technology (is that enough buzzwords?). Here’s what I mean.

1. I would be able to whitelist or blacklist commenters. I’d actually like something a little more fine-grained than just blacklisting: I’d like one class for trolls, another for spammers. Trolls might actually have something interesting to say once in a while, spammers (almost by definition) don’t, so I might want to put troll postings into a moderation queue and simply shitcan anything from a spammer.
2. I would be able to publish my whitelist, troll-list, and spam-list as separate items.
3. À la LOAF, I would be able to subscribe to someone else’s various lists. If I know “I can count on Alice’s whitelist”, then I’d automatically whitelist anyone she does. One might be able to take this a step farther and use “two degrees of whitelisting/blackisting.” If I really, really trust Alice, I might be willing to trust all the whitelists/blacklists that she subscribes to herself. Of course, we’d need some kind of RSD format for publishing our whitelists and blacklists to make this work. I suppose you could get into the question of whether you want to reveal to others whose whitelist you subscribe to, but frankly, that level of cliquishness strikes me as way too silly to worry about.