How moderation works
Every comment passes a few quick checks and then an AI review. Most comments are published within a second or two without anyone looking at them. The ones the AI is unsure about wait in your moderation queue. If nobody gets to them, they are decided for you after a deadline. Rejected comments are kept for a while, then their content is permanently deleted.
You control the thresholds, the deadline and the retention window from Moderation Rules. See Rules and lifecycle.
The journey of a comment
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Instant checks | Blocked words, suspicious links and posting too fast are caught. |
| 2. Trusted author? | Authors with a long, good record are published at once. |
| 3. AI review | Clearly fine: published. Clearly harmful: rejected. Unsure: sent to your queue. |
| 4. Your queue | You approve or reject. |
| 5. Nobody acted | Decided automatically after your deadline. |
| 6. Rejected comments | Content deleted after the retention window. |
While a comment waits at any step, your readers do not see it. Its author sees it as submitted.
1. Instant checks
These run in milliseconds, before the comment is saved.
- Spam limits. An author can post 5 comments per minute and 30 per hour. Posting the same text again and again triggers a stronger response: that day's comments from the author go back to review, and they cannot post for 24 hours.
- Link rules. Links to known image hosts pass. Link shorteners, and links from brand-new accounts, go to your queue. Established authors can post links freely.
- Word rules. Words and phrases that block a comment, send it to your queue, or are only logged. They can be limited to one language, so a word that is an insult in one language but harmless in another only fires where it should. Word rules cannot be edited from the Site Console yet.
2. Trusted authors skip ahead
Every author has a trust score from 0 to 100, starting at 50:
| Event | Change |
|---|---|
| A comment is approved | +1 |
| A comment is rejected or marked as spam | −10 |
| The account turns 30 days old | +5 |
| The account turns 90 days old | +5 |
An author with a score of 60 or more and at least 15 approved comments is trusted: their comments are published at once, without an AI review. Your regulars never wait behind the queue. One rejection costs as much trust as ten approvals, so trust is hard to win back once lost.
3. AI review
The AI scores every other comment in six categories, from 0 (nothing there) to 1 (unmistakable):
hate_speech · insult · threat · fraud · explicit · nonsense
Your flag rules decide what each score means. Every category has two thresholds:
- At or above review, the comment goes to your queue.
- At or above reject, it is rejected at once.
- Below both, it is published.
Every category starts on built-in thresholds, which you can change one category at a time. nonsense is scored and shown in the analysis, but by default it does not hold comments back: gibberish is annoying, not harmful.
The AI also takes your content category into account. "This character is disgusting, I hated him" is ordinary criticism on a comics site and a problem in a shop's product reviews. Setting the category (comics, ecommerce, news, gaming, forum, education, social or general) lets the AI read comments in the right context.
4. Your queue
Comments the AI was unsure about wait in Comments & Moderation, on the Pending tab. For each one you see why it was flagged, the scores behind that, and the author's trust profile. You approve or reject. Approving publishes the comment and adds trust; rejecting hides it and takes trust away. See Moderating comments.
Reports from readers
Readers can report a published comment. Reports are weighted by the reporter's own trust score, so a reliable reader counts for more than a brand-new account. When enough weight builds up, the comment appears in your queue. A reported comment stays visible while it waits: a report alone is not enough to hide something.
5. When nobody gets to the queue
This runs whether you are watching or not. If a comment waits past your review deadline (7 days by default), the system decides it for you, so an unattended queue never buries good comments forever. You choose how:
| Deadline action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Automatic (default) | Decides by the AI score: at or above the cut-off (60% by default) is rejected, below is approved. |
| Approve | Always publishes. |
| Reject | Always rejects. |
| Keep waiting | Never decides automatically. The queue holds until someone acts. |
Some comments are never decided this way:
- Comments their author deleted stay deleted.
- Comments you already decided are simply cleared from the queue.
- Reported comments get a fresh AI review instead. Their author may have been trusted, so there may be no score to go by. If the new review sends the comment back to the queue and it expires again, the report is dropped.
Automatic decisions never change the author's trust score. The deadline decided, not the author's behavior. In the comment's analysis, automatic decisions are labelled as such, so you can tell them apart from yours.
6. What happens to rejected comments
A rejected comment disappears from your site at once, but it is kept for your retention window (180 days by default, 30 days to 10 years) in case the decision is disputed. When the window ends, its content is permanently deleted:
- Nobody replied to it: the comment is deleted entirely, with its images.
- Someone replied to it: the comment stays as an empty placeholder so the conversation below it holds together. Its text, images, the author's IP address and browser details are deleted. Readers see it as deleted, as before.
7. Checking the AI
A few times a day, the system takes a random 1% of recently rejected comments and puts them in your queue for a second look. They let you spot the AI over-rejecting. Reviewing one changes nothing unless you approve it. If you keep finding good comments among them, your thresholds are too strict.
Common questions
A comment was rejected and its author asks why. Open it in Comments & Moderation. Comments the AI rejected show its full analysis: which categories fired, how strongly, and its verdict. Decisions made before analyses were stored have none.
Do I need to check the queue every day? No, that is what the deadline is for. The automatic decision is a fallback, though, not a substitute: it cannot read context the way you can. Choose Keep waiting only if someone really works the queue.
An author says their comment vanished. Check whether they hit a spam limit. Posting the same text repeatedly blocks posting for 24 hours and sends that day's comments back to review. It is the most common cause.