When considering the various pros and cons of employing an on-site comments section, publishers can sometimes feel a bit wary of the potential burden of comment moderation that comes along with one. We totally get it—after all, the prospect of having to manually sift through and review each incoming comment is a daunting one, especially so for overstretched editorial and community management teams, as well as for sites that generate large volumes of comments.

Let's face it: moderation can seem like one huge drag—a time-consuming and emotionally draining one at that. But what if moderation didn’t have to be a drag? What if you had access to proactive and intelligent moderation tools that did all of the heavy lifting for you?

That’s where Advanced Moderation comes in. With this set of features, you can rest assured as our AI-boosted moderation engines programmatically identify and take action upon unwelcome comments that fall into an expanded list of categories, ultimately resulting in moderation policies as scalable as they are customizable.

With Advanced Moderation, you can lean on our tools to create the community environment that most closely aligns with your site’s values—without the migraine.

What is Advanced Moderation, exactly?

Advanced Moderation refers to an enhanced set of comment filters that evaluate and categorize incoming comments that contain hate speech, sexuality, violence, bullying, product promotion, spam, and general toxicity.

These new comment filters leverage technology that combines algorithm-powered machine learning and human-level contextual understanding to achieve unparalleled accuracy in identifying unwelcome comments—without generating bothersome false positives.

Comment identification is just the first step. It’s what our tools can then DO with those unwelcome comments that really makes Advanced Moderation special.

Our new Advanced Moderation offering includes improved Moderation Rules that allow you to designate certain automatic actions to be taken on flagged comments. You can choose to have flagged comments either deleted outright or sent to the pending queue for further review. Moderation Rules allow you to effectively establish the desired tone for your community as our tools go to work enforcing your comment policies for you, freeing up time for publisher teams and eliminating the need to manually moderate comments. 

Maximum precision and control

When it comes to publishers and their comment policies, one size does not fit all—and so we built our moderation tools accordingly. That’s why we give you a greater degree of control over how your Moderation Rules work by introducing the concept of Severity Levels into our comment filters.

For each flagged comment, our filters generate a specific Severity Level that scores how explicit or extreme the comment is. Each of the above categories is indexed on a severity scale of 1 to 3; flagged comments with a Severity Level of 3 will be the most explicit or extreme, while comments with a Severity Level of 1 are less so (but are still flagged as potentially unwelcome).

Publishers that desire a more lenient policy can designate that actions are taken upon only the more extreme comments, while other publishers with a more strict policy can choose to have actions taken upon any flagged comment no matter the extremity.

This way, Advanced Moderation grants you much more precision and control over how your automated comment policies are enforced.

Advanced Moderation WORKS

Since we debuted our new Advanced Moderation features this past summer, hundreds of publishers have started using them to automate their moderation policies and save countless hours of manual comment review.

For some of our larger publishers, Advanced Moderation Rules are proactively eliminating thousands of unwelcome comments per week. Think of all the time you’d typically have to spend manually sifting through each of those. Advanced Moderation gives you that time BACK for more productive, meaningful, and, yes, more enjoyable tasks.

The best part? Set up is a complete breeze. We asked a group of publishers to estimate how much time they spent setting up their Advanced Moderation rules.

The answer? Seven minutes.

In just seven minutes, publishers have been able to create automated moderation policies that eliminate unwelcome comments, drastically cut down on time spent manually moderating, and ultimately uphold the community environment that works best for their website.

Step your moderation game up now

Advanced Moderation is currently available to our Disqus Pro and Business customers. Interested in trying Advanced Moderation out?  Sign up for a free 30-day Disqus Pro trial and start exploring our new features today.  

Need help getting started with Advanced Moderation? Check out these handy resources: