Response time, response time, response time. After you mark a message as ham or spam, you must be able to move on to the next item with no further delay. If there is any waiting for the action just performed, the waiting must happen in the background. Two examples of where this rule is not followed: the Drupal “delete this post” action, and my own mailreader (Gnus) when I’m approving Subversion mailing list posts.

Also, no confirmation step. Asking for confirmation is pessimal: you pay the price in advance for a mistake you might or might not be about to make. And of course, you just habituate to the confirmation step anyway; thus confirmation is only useful when the confirmation-requiring action is liable to be accidentally invoked instead of some other non-confirmation-requiring action. That’s not the case in, say, the Drupal interface.

The better alternative to confirmation is rollback — the ability to realize you’ve just made a mistake and undo it. So that means posts marked as spam go to a holding bin. A post can be automatically flushed out of that bin after 24 hours or a week or whatever; the point is that it just needs to be available for retrieval in the few seconds after one marks it as spam, because that’s the window in which one realizes one miscategorized something.

Note how this is tied in with the response time / no confirmation step rules: if the interface allows you to fly along marking things one way or the other, then your brain starts pipelining, and you will usually realize you’ve mis-marked something a few messages later. Example: deleting spams (not moderating, just deleting) in a Gnus mail group using the “e” key. Post-marking realization of miscategorization is by far the common case there, in my experience. Thus, marking must be undo-able within a reasonable window.

Thanks for the tip. I’m using a content management system (Drupal), so I’d need to persuade its code for displaying comments to add that attribute. I’ll take a look at Drupal and see what that would involve.

Anonymity really is the death of courtesy.

When possible, she accompanies her post with an attractive userpic.

Glad to hear you were real. I’ll keep an eye out for your reply when moderating the site.

Since my entire article above is precisely about the difficulty of distinguishing between (or even defining) “spammy” and “legitimate” posts in this new era of paid-link spam, I’m not sure how better to explain the situation.

Note that I’m not accusing you of being a paid-link spammer; it seems clear you’re not. I’m merely pointing out that it is now becoming very hard for site moderators to tell the difference quickly enough to moderate efficiently.

http://blog.labnotes.org/2008/07/06/smart-spam-and-new-comment-policy/#comment-140779

…responding to Labnotes’s automated comment (which is not a spam, by the way, despite surface appearances — see the above link for why).

-Karl