A post on the BBC Editors blog announces some developments on the BBC News’s Have Your Say forums. With each story they are now publishing the numbers of rejected comments and the number of comments in the moderation queue. If you sign in, it also tells you the status of all of your comments. The blog post reports that 49% of comments are now published (up from 25% a couple of years ago). Interestingly, the majority of the non-published comments seem to have simply never made it through the moderation queue, rather than having been rejected (no doubt some third party website will soon start keeping a record of these figures).
This seems like a positive step forward, and will hopefully better manage the expectations of the users. The only metric that might be missing is the amount of time it takes on average for each comment to get published. And whilst the post says “we hope these changes will encourage more people to take part”, I can well imagine that some people will be put off from commenting by the sometimes enormous moderation queue.
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