Disappearing comments and blog posts

I've seen a few remarks recently wondering what has happened to comments posted to the site, so here's a bit of explanation of where your posts might be held up.

One possibility is that the post has been sent to moderation by our spam filter. This scans posts for words matching a blacklist of terms frequently used by spammers. An editor will then review quarantined posts and if your post has been filtered in error, it will be pushed live. This can sometimes take a few hours, but we believe the delay is worth it to keep spam off the site.

We'll send you an email to let you know that this has happened, but if you want to follow up, send us an email at community.manager@zdnet.co.uk.

Alternatively, your post may have been removed from the site as it contravenes our Terms and Conditions or our Code of Conduct. Our goal with the community is to make it a place where you can share and read useful opinions and experiences, so we try to keep out marketing blurbs (including promotion of corporate events), PR pitches and advertising, for example.

We also ask our members to make sure their posts will appeal to IT pros (so not just about business technology, but also stuff that tech-savvy people will like, such as scientific breakthroughs or nifty gadgets). They should also be valuable -- so a post with just a URL may be removed -- and security is also a factor in this.

Basically, we're urging people to make comments that will further the discussion. If you post a one-word reaction, for example, we may remove this so that the thread doesn't get cluttered up. There are alternatives: If you're reading a story, you can always express your liking by choosing one of the 'Did you find this article useful?' icons. And if you're looking at a blog, why not drop the author a note via our internal messaging system?

Overall, we try to balance the interests of the community against those of the individual, and to correct the balance where needed. Of course, we're open to feedback on this: What do you think? Should we hide comments like 'Great!'? Or do members want to us to allow them and let the readers ignore them as they will?

Let me know what you think.