Allowing website users to leave comments under your blog posts or product pages is a great way of creating engaging and collecting positive reviews and testimonials. But not all the people who land on your site are nice and with good intentions. Indeed, many are not people at all, but bots. This is how sites accumulate a lot of spam and inappropriate comments. Filtering and deleting them manually is very hard work. Instead, many websites use content moderation tools.
What Are Content Moderation Tools?
Content moderation tools are third party plugins installed on your website They are specifically programmed to detect and remove unwanted comments. The rise of user-generated content (UGC) has brought many challenges, such as hate speech and inappropriate content, which can harm businesses, individuals and communities.
There are several types of content moderation available, including:
- Pre-moderation – where content is queued for approval before it is published on the website
- Post-moderation – where a content moderator reviews content after it has been published
- Automated moderation – using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, to automatically identify and remove inappropriate content or comments posted on online platforms, which can be faster and more efficient than human moderators
Content moderation software offers a range of features to help websites moderate comments and other UGCs effectively. These include text, image, audio, video moderation and smart filtering to detect and block damaging or undesirable content. Some moderation software offers real-time moderation for social networks, while Moderation API is also available, allowing social media platforms to integrate comment moderation into their existing systems and workflows.
Some of the basic detection features any website needs are:
- Spam links leading to unsafe websites
- Profanity
- Nudity
- Sales of dangerous or controlled materials
- Threatening, insulting comments.
Every piece of content on your site must be polite, courteous and free of adult materials. The issue is that you cannot control what others post on your site. Failing to moderate comments can have a negative impact on your business reputation.
Just consider that a user leaves a positive review on your site. Another user, who had a negative experience with the product, starts calling them names and derogatory terms. If you do nothing about the insulting comment, the initially happy client will probably stop commenting or even buying your products.
Is It Really So Hard to Remove Spam Comments Manually?
You may wonder now: why should I spend money on these tools? Just how difficult is it to remove those unwanted comments myself or ask an employee to do so?
Here are some of the key difficulties:
1. You May Get Hundreds of Spam Comments Each Day
The more you work on your SEO strategy and the more visible your website gets, the highest the likelihood of getting spam traffic is. At the beginning, when your site is newly launched, you may manage comment moderation on your own.
But what happens when you get hundreds of spam comments, each on different pages of your website? This means hours of work to remove them. Moderation tools do the job in a few moments.
2. You May Miss Some Spam Comments
No matter how careful and diligent you are, you may skip a spam comment. So, what’s the problem – just one comment can’t do a lot of harm. If it takes one of your clients on a phishing site where they get their personal data stolen and their cards emptied of funds, that person will start warning others from visiting your site, because it is unsafe.
As more and more situations like this one happen, Google will downgrade your website rating and your SEO efforts will be in vain. So, even one spam comment can do a lot of harm to your business reputation online.
Comment moderation tools are designed to identify all types of spam comments and delete them.
3. You Cannot Afford to Leave Spam Comments until the Next Day
Assuming that you have finished deleting spam comments for the day, you go about your business. You will repeat the action the next day. But this means that there are around 23 hours when a new spam comment can appear on your site, hurting your reputation or insulting a customer.
That customer will wait for you to take action. They will not wait for very long – maybe several minutes. When they see that the insulting comment is still there, they will take offense against your business.
With comment moderation tools, you don’t have this problem. They will remove any spam comment immediately as it is posted.
Moreover, the majority of these comments do not even pass the filter of these tools and are not actually posted on your site.
Content Moderation Tools We Recommend for Your Website
Keeping these important benefits in mind, these are the tools we recommend for your website:
1. WebPurify
This is one of the oldest and most effective content moderation tools. Founded in 2007, the tool received constant updates and upgrades. It is currently used by some of the biggest websites, such as Microsoft and NBC Universal.
The key features of WebPurify are:
- Profanity filter for 15 languages
- Photo moderation
- Video moderation
- Embedded text filter
- Offensive intent detection.
The tool has 3 state pricing plans, ranging from US $5 to US $50 per month, plus customized services for very large and complex websites.
2. Hive Moderation
One site that uses this tool, an online gaming platform, reported a 90% decrease in complaints for inappropriate comments after installing Hive Moderation.
This tool offers comprehensive filtering for:
- Text – 17 languages supported
- Images
- Videos
- Audio files.
Hive Moderation can even detect and block inappropriate and spam content in animated GIF files and live streams.
You can request a demo on their site and then discuss tailored pricing depending on the services you need for your website.
3. Sightengine
A pioneer in the field, Sightengine was the first company to offer content moderation based on deep learning. It is a scalable tool, ideal both for small and complex websites.
You can set the rules and the acceptable thresholds for nudity, profanity and spam in:
- Text
- Images
- Videos.
What makes this tool more attractive for small businesses is the fact that they offer a free plan which includes up to 2,000 content moderation operations per month. The Starter plan costs US $29 per month and includes 10,000 operations and just US 0.002 per any additional operation.
4. EasyCMT
EasyCMT detects and removes spam in text and images. It also prevents users from using ALL CAPS or alternative symbols ($ instead of s, 3 instead of e) to type profane or insulting words.
Additionally, the latest update to the tool includes a pro-war toxicity detection filter.
Moreover, this is one of the moderation tools that offer a free version which covers the needs of small businesses.
5. ModerateContent
ModerateContent is your best choice if you want to cover all the latest ways in which users may try to damage your business reputation using images as comments. This includes:
- QR codes leading users to malicious sites
- Anime containing nudity and offensive gestures
- Face detection
- Bad word scanning and replacement in 27 languages.
Key Takeaways
Content moderation tools help keep your website safe and family friendly for all the users. You don’t have to worry about spam comments, inappropriate language and images, because these tools act as a barrier between your site and malicious users.
With several free moderation tools available, even a start-up entrepreneur can afford to keep their website free of spam comments from day one.