Managing comments can be a difficult task, as you want to encourage commenting but at the same time know when to step in to direct the discussion.

Your responsibilities as a blogger don’t stop at the end of a post. If you’re the sole author on your blog, you’re responsible for a lot more than updates, and one of your biggest responsibilities is maintaining order in your comment forums.

Whether you’re posting about the War in Iraq, the War on Drugs or Warren G, someone out there will have something to say about it. And the more readers you have, the more heated the discussion is going to get.

As the moderator, you’d be wise to come up with a set of guidelines for proper comment behavior, and post it somewhere on your site. You can create this according to your pleasure – it is, of course, your blog – but make sure you’re coming up with rules you’re willing to enforce. You might hate swear words, but are you going to ban users who persistently swear on your comments or simply give them a slap on the wrist?

How low can you go? When to intercede.

As we’ve all heard ad nauseam, the internet provides a sense of anonymity. And as we’ve all discovered, a sense of anonymity prompts a lot of people to behave like total jackasses. When people get into a heated discussion in real life, they make some effort to keep their cool. Online, an argument can quickly escalate into a pointless series of personal insults.

How low are you willing to let things get? If and when you intercede is entirely up to you. Censorship is a tricky issue; you don’t want to be banning everyone who gets a little hot under the collar or presents an opinion you find offensive. On the other hand, it’s important to maintain an environment that your other users feel comfortable in. If you run a knitting blog, you might want to ban users who come in throwing rude words around right and left, or at least ask them to tone it down a bit for the sake of your other commenters and readers. (Or maybe knitters are just as foul as everyone else; I don’t know. It’s a sport I’ve never been able to master.)

The only red flag you can’t ignore is the use of slurs. Leaving racist or sexist slurs on the page, and neglecting the obligatory wrist-slap/full ban for the person who wrote them, is a great way to get rid of all your good commenters in a hurry.

Some sample guidelines:

Well’s Fargo’s blog has some rather strict guidelines (Comment Guidelines).

Lifehacker offers a whole post on how to write comments, which you can adapt when writing your guidelines. My favorite piece of advice: Don’t tease the trolls.

Yakkity yak: when to talk back.

Experts in the field of comment moderation are torn on the issue of comment response. When should you join in on a discussion in your forums? Should you participate at all, or should you remain aloof and let your readers talk amongst themselves?

Personally, I find it a little sad when an author responds to every comment. To me, this says that she is poised by her computer hitting refresh over and over, waiting for some signal from the outside world that someone is reading her posts.

However, it is important to jump in with clarifications on the original post when necessary. You can also respond to corrections. And I like to welcome new commenters by responding to their comments, especially on sites where there is an established community who know each other. It’s your job to help new people feel included, which encourages them to return.

Building a community of power users

Drop-ins commenters who comment on your site once or twice are useful. They provide an influx of new blood, a variety of new opinions, and prevent your site from getting stale with the same voices repeated over and over.

But your real strength lies in your power users. These are the folks who read your site regularly, if not religiously. They have friendships with other users that they maintain via your comment forums. They always have something to say about your posts, and they’re not shy about saying it.

Power users begin as ordinary users. To grow a power user, you need to court her. Nurture the discussions she takes part in by responding to her comments with thoughtful comments of your own. Reward her by quoting her better comments in your post. You can also resort to blatant bribery to turn users into power users. One of my favorite bloggers, Deborah Ng from Freelance Writing Jobs, occasionally holds a contest wherein she offers an Amazon gift certificate to the user who leaves the most comments in a given time period.

You can also acquire power users from other sites using linklove. As Leo Babuta points out here, linking to other blogs often garners you links to your own blog. Power users from another site might follow these links, and if they like your blog, you may have earned yourself a power user of your own.

Let us know what steps you take when moderating your blog’s comments.