What are your solution(s) to the following problem?
If students posts their comments on the same blog within a few seconds of each other some of the students can end up losing their comments. They will get a warning message and when they return to the post their comment is gone.
What happens is although the students are on different computers their comments are from the same IP address. The blog detects the comments are coming from the same IP addresses and says this might be someone posting spam comments. It’s a feature to prevent blogs from being spammed.
Please share your tips:
- How do you get your students to slow down when posting comments on the same blog?
- What method(s) do you use to prevent student comments from being lost?
- What other advice do you give students when leaving comments on other people’s blogs?
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22 Comments So Far»
I recommend copying the text in a comment before hitting submit. That way if anything goes wrong you still have your comment and can paste it in comment box.
Easiest solution I would think would be comment moderation. I’m betting that the reported concern in the forums was based on a class doing the “How many comments can we leave and how quickly can we leave them” race that I’ve noted some classes do occasionally have. Having the blog admin approve each comment gives time to visitors to have them read what’s been approved.
I also think the logged in users don’t have this check idea I suggested may have some merit. We already do that with the Captchas on comments as logged in users don’t have to deal with them.
Maybe the idea of leaving thought out and well developed comments may be of consideration as well.
pennyryder gave some excellent advice. I always copy my comment before submitting. There isn’t anything more frustrating than to lose an excellent comment.
I believe you are running WordPress, and the portion of code that performs this logic may be able to be disabled. Of course, you might then open yourself to other problems.
An extreme solution is to switch blog providers entirely. I don’t have this issue on my BlogEngine based blog. Nor would I suspect a Blogger blog would have this issue. Seems to be isolated to WP users.
A reader must also understand their responsibilites while posting any comment, the moderators no doubt will do their tasks but why do we force them to delete the comments without viewing it properly. I think we should need to think twice before posting any comment.
I do moderated comments on class blogs, so that is not a problem. This is a problem if you have a whole lab (35) computers with kids posting comments at the same time, which is what I have. I’ve taught them how to select all, copy, and paste. I’ve had times where the browser would “remember” what they had typed in when they hit the back button, but lately, it’s all gone unless they remember to copy.It would be nice if it could handle multiple comments at the same time.
I’ve stopped having my class blog in a lab situation because of this problem – hadn’t thought of having them copy and paste first. I have 2 computers in my classroom and when I’m wanting the kids to add to blogs, I have a check list next to the computers. During the day, they blog and tick off their name. We get through the whole class without too much of an issue. While this works well in a Primary class as the children are there all day long, doubt it would work so well in a Secondary one with students moving from room to room during the day.
Excellent tip Penny. I use cocomment in my web browser so even if a comment is lost I can retrieve it from cocomment.
Hi Dr Mike, after you wrote this suggestion I went and tested it with comment moderation. Unfortunately it still stops the second comment regardless of the setting. But now reading your comment again I think you might be saying writing a comment after each comment has been approved?
Yes Wayne I think Penny made an excellent suggestion. Yes Edublogs uses WordPress and it is possibly not a feature of other blogging platforms. Unfortunately with over 250,000 blogs changing the code isn’t an option because it will change it site wide.
Thanks for your tip. That is an excellent method of working your class through the process and also ensuring that they take time to consider the comments they post.
Yes I agree that being able to handle multiple comments would be nice however the change would need to be made site wide. This could increase issues with spam comments so I don’t think it is a change James would be keen to make.
I have just begin blogging with one of my classes and the kids thought it was a giggle that the blog couldn’t keep up with them! I will use the cut & paste idea though that seems to make good sense. Apart from that the kids are really engaged – yay!!
That’s the problem. You get kids doing browser refreshing, noticing yet another comment been added, and they have to respond just to do so. With comment moderation, the blog admin has to approve those comments so they show up in time and you don’t have the constant refreshing just to see if something new is there and even more comments.
I know it’s a hard concept and I’m not expressing it well.
The copy and paste idea would work as well. You’ll probably still hit the limit but it would take a few seconds to do that and spread the comments out a bit.
The real problem though is the lab setup and with everyone on the same IP address. Knowing school budgets, there’s probably no way around that though. Unless the code was fixed to look at the proxy IP address in addition to the visible address. A check to see if the user was logged in and therefore bypass the IP address check would work as well but I guess that’s been vetoed. I can understand why but I know on our installs, we’ve not seen spam made by logged in users. I think the multisiteness of the software confuses the bots. They still register but since it comes back for a different URL (ie the main site one) we feel that the bots don’t pick up on that and therefore they don’t realize that they now have an in like they do on regular single wordpress sites.
By the way, do we know if all these kids are commenting on the same post or different ones?
Another thought would be to work on how the posts are written. Maybe more questions or suggestions for discussions may be an idea. Give the students time to think about what’s been said and the need to respond more would be a plus.
OK, I”m done rambling.
Dr Mike, I’ve checked it and doesn’t matter whether it is the same post or a different post – if it is the same blog and comments are posted to closely together the system will prevent the second comment from being posted.
I know that Sue Wyatt often uses comment moderation to ensure that her students take their time and write their own comments without referring to other comments.
Hi Lisa-Gaye, great to hear your students are enjoying blogging. I know I will probably regret saying this but writing comments is probably one situation where I would say writing in Word before adding the comment would be another option. But definitely not copy/pasting Word into blog posts.
I do the same thing- it’s just habit now to copy what I’m writing before I submit. I do it on everything including facebook.
What plugin is this for the reply comments? It’s really neat…
Hi Talia – the Threaded Comments Plugin. It is my favorite plugin as opposed to Let it Snow which should be banned!
Talia, I’ve got so used to using cocomment I don’t botther. One day cocomment will let me down and you will probably hear me screaming in Queensland!
thank you so much for your comment. I actually used iMovie to make my video and the hardest part was converting it to quicktime because youtube only lets you upload quicktime format. Once I figured out the process it became very easy and fast.
I am very passionate about people that aren’t fortunate to have health care or money to even supply food for themselves and I think that it is important to let them know that you care in any way possible. Even as simple as spreading the word can be the kindest gesture.
Well you did an excellent job with the video and I told people in my network to pop past to check it out. Excellent work.
I’ve had the same issue with comments being deleted and thx. for the tips. It looks like my idea if typing a comment in Word and pasting is OK fro comments, not blog posts though. Bote: I used to use comment moderation for my blog and students still lost comments from tome to time as some would not show up for my approval. A questions and note:
1. How/where is cocomment?
2. I never had this problem in the sping of 2008, then in the fall of 2008, comments would be lost. Used same lab, etc. Strange.
Dave
@Dave, CoComment is a comment tracking tool. While it is an option writing is Word is probably the best option.
Technically speaking since the upgrade you can write a post in Word and then paste it into your blog post and it will be fine. It is now stripping out the bad code automatically.
It may be related to changes made when upgraded that you now have more problems or perhaps they are posting faster.
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