I have been thinking about getting rid of comment moderation. Over the last few months the number of comments has grown, as I had hoped, but thankfully there has been no comment spam. For that reason I am getting rid of comment moderation so that comments will be immediately available when they are posted. I can still delete spam comments if they come, but unless the get bad I will leave comment moderation off. No more waiting until I get time to approve and publish your comments.
We have moderation turned on for our website even though a combination of Akismet and the Bad Behavior plugins catches or prevents all spam. I think moderation is just fine if you want to be able to do troll control or filter out profanity from comments which both my wife and I do. Some bloggers (like Lorelle of WordPress fame) will argue that excessive spam filtering punishes legit users, and I would tend to agree overall. It’s a tough call to make, and I think moderation boils down to personal choice above all.
I agree with that mindset. My experience with this blog so far has been that I don’t need to do troll control, if I do in the future I will definitely be enabling moderation again.