Here’s a followup to my post, This Entry Is Full of Silent Failure (incidentally, one of my more favorite headlines) — I got a Facebook message from a reader who pointed out that this blog included some silent failure of its own: When commenters submit their comments, they’re held for moderation, so the comments don’t show up immediately. However, we didn’t have a notice to that effect, so to would-be commenters, it looked like an actual posting problem — sssshh, silent failure.

I passed this along to Shashi, so now there’s notice telling people about the post moderation (along with this blog’s terms of use), just above the comment field, which should help a little bit.

Now, from what we know of participation inequality, it’s usually hard enough to get people to comment (unless you’re YouTube and your problem is too many morons) so you want to make sure you’re not putting up unnecessary barriers that drive people away from commenting.

Here are a few other thoughts about how you can make commenting easier and better for your readers and yourself (noting full well that I’m in a glass house throwing stones, though I’ve made a few suggestions to the team on how we can improve the commenting here).

* Registration: Let’s face it — requiring registration to comment is a fact of life. (Especially for higher trafficked blogs. Thank you, spammers and trolls.) The problem is that there’s a difference between requiring a valid e-mail address, and making people register for yet another account, with another password I’m going to forget immediately (unless I do what I’m not supposed to do and use the same password all over the place).

Theoretically, this is where Open ID would really shine, although it’s still not living up to its promise. We’re seeing some comment registration portability by platform (register once and your WordPress or Blogger identity carries across the network), but there are still a lot of one-off blog registrations, especially on news sites.

I tell you, I have to be really motivated to register for Yet Another Blog Commenting System. Though this is also mitigated by…

* Centralized commenting systems: Not only do comment aggregation and centralization services (like Disqus, which we use here) help reduce the need for one-off registrations, but they also help take fragmented conversations, siloed in disparate blogs, and turn them into a more unified conversations. Theoretically, anyway — there’s a lot of room for improvement here.

Related (and available as a separate set of tools are)…

* Comment tracking: When you get notified when someone replies to your comment, it helps close the conversational loop. coComment and Commentful are services available to users, though even with browser extensions or bookmarklets, it’s up to the user to remember to use them. (I still forget to track my comments with annoying regularity.)

More and more, though, we’re seeing blog and other Web publishing platforms provide the built-in option to notify commenters via e-mail when there’s a reply. It helps turn one-way postings (à la guestbooks) into something more like two-way discussions.

* Comment activity indicators: The benefit to this are pretty straightforward: No one likes talking to an empty room, so things like comment counts and recently posted comments help show where people are talking.

* Comment preview: Different commenting systems allow different things. Some accept HTML tags (like <b></b> and <i></i>), some don’t; others automatically turn URLs into hyperlinks; others don’t allow anything except plain text. If you don’t have the ability to preview comments, you run the risk of looking like a n00b because your HTML link code is visible (oh, and also broke your link). People generally don’t like looking dumb.

Like I always say, a blog that doesn’t allow commenting isn’t a blog, it’s just kind of blog-ish. Even though accepting comments opens a whole lot of headaches, they’re still valuable and part of what makes the platform so valuable, so it behooves us to make the commenting process as smooth and as valuable as possible.

Got your own thoughts about improving the commenting experience? Please feel free to… leave a comment. (Duh.)

The theme of this particular episode, Ruining It for the Rest of Us, was bad apples — people who spoil things for other people. The prologue featured an experiment by Dr. Will Felps, a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, who wanted to see what would happen to the productivity of a group when faced with a bad apple — in this case, a planted actor who exhibited one of three toxic behaviors: being a big jerk (generally nasty and sarcastic), a slacker (not pulling their own weight), or a depressive pessimist (a negative Nancy, a nattering nabob of negatism).

As it happens, the negative individual — the bad apple — was consistently able to spoil the bunch, causing his groups to be much less productive than the control groups.

Although this makes sense to me (don’t we all know a co-worker from hell who poisoned the workplace well?), apparently, this isn’t supposed to happen — studies on group dynamics seem to think that individuals will be changed by groups, rather than the other way around.

There was one exception to the bad apple spoiling the bunch — in one group, there was a good leader: someone who, just by asking questions and listening to people, was able to counteract the bad apple and keep the group on course.

Now, I don’t want to read too much into this one study (most of which you can see here: “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups“), especially because it plays into the conceits of social media and community management types. I think we tend to overestimate the power of leadership and moderation in shaping the culture of a community, and the whole idea of conversation influencing groups just makes us *swoon*.

But it’s a useful data point.

Problematic as they are offline, bad apples can even worse online. Online communities are usually bigger; depending on how the group has formed, you might not have had prior dealings with other members; you lose nonverbal cues; and it’s generally easier to be nasty to someone online — especially when you throw in anonymity.

Plus, if you’ve ever dealt with a bad actor online (a troll or flamer), you know how it’s easy to get drowned out. Online, one person can shout down a group, whereas offline, it’s usually the other way around. For example, a comment thread has passed the point of any usefulness when the people left in the conversation are all arguing with one person. When you see this, you know it’s time to go (mostly because all the normal people have dropped out.)

You do have some advantages dealing with bad apples online –  there are tools to filter and ignore, or even moderate and ban, bad actors. And if it’s a conversation space that you control (nominally), you can at least lay out the guidelines and try to set a good example — even control membership. (Though use too heavy of a hand and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.)

Anyway, if you’ve got your own stories about or strategies for dealing with bad apples in a group, please feel free to share in the comments.