Today I read a post called Era of blogger’s control is over.  The author described the discontent of some bloggers with the comments on their site.  They don’t like the direction the conversation takes, the poor quality of the comments and the general lack of control.

This is something my office worried about when launching our consumer protection blog.  We weighed the pros and cons of comments when deciding whether to limit, moderate or all together disallow them.  We were concerned over politically charged comments, misinformation and obscenity.  We decided we needed someone to filter the comments before they were posted.  I thought this was a good idea until we realized one of us would have to read, edit and post all the comments, which none of us had time to do.  Because we are a state agency, we felt the risk of inappropriate comments was too high for us to allow them without a filter.

We still wanted to have a dialogue with our blog readers and allow them to provide us with feedback.  So, we provided an e-mail address for them to send their comments directly to our office.  This is not a perfect system, but a working solution to the problem of losing control over comments on our blog.

At the end of the post on bloggers losing control, the author asked other bloggers what they thought about the issue.  I am interested to see if some consensus is reached in the comments, or if the conversation wanders with poor grammar ridden comments.