This week Bang the Table forfeited what would have been a large contract with a marquee client by refusing to pre-moderate comments.

By pre-moderation I refer to the practice of the moderator reviewing and either approving, deleting or editing all comments before they are displayed on the site. Pre-moderation is commonly instituted when an organisation has strong fears about what the community may post on their site and/or does not have the means to moderate out of business hours.

At first blush the decision to knock back a good contract may seem strange; but to us it was clear cut.

Bang the Table’s mission is to bring as many people as possible into conversations about public policy. Our software, EngagementHQ, has been specifically designed with this mission in mind.

Everything we do is geared to getting as many people in the community as possible involved in discussions and helping our clients to interpret the results and to be able to really listen to these people. Refusing to trust the community to post comments directly to the site runs directly contrary to our mission and we don’t want our brand associated with this practice.

Have you ever used a site that pre moderates comments? It is a perplexing experience at best and at worst it is confusing and frustrating. The essential problem is that, as members of the community, when we take the time to craft a comment or response we want to see it on the screen. When it doesn’t appear we start to wonder what we have done wrong – are our views being censored?

Worse still, even in actively moderated sites, by the time your comment is posted the conversation has moved on. But in most Government sites, where comments are looked at in office hours you may be waiting many hours or even days to see your comment posted. It is simply impossible to have a conversation with ones fellow contributors under these conditions.

Pre-moderation kills discussion – it lends itself to statement making and position taking which is something we try to minimise when holding a constructive community dialogue.

So what are the risks of allowing the community to post directly to a forum? Well having managed well in excess of 200 online engagement projects we think that in the context of an anonymous forum the risks are few and are routinely over stated so long as you have a round the clock moderation service in place. We remove under 2% of comments from our sites. The vast majority of these are due to minor transgressions such as posting duplicates, poor language choices or straying off topic. In two and half years of operation we have not had remove a single instance of highly offensive, defamatory or otherwise high risk material.

Letting people post straight to the site does not mean that a post-moderated site is uncontrolled. We have recently blogged about our 3 phase moderation process including automated checking for blacklisted words and spam at the time a comment is posted, a triage view by a member of the moderation team and a supervisor assessment for borderline comments. We guarantee to have a real and skilled person read every single comment coming in within 2 hours 24/7 and in truth we average well under an hour before comments are checked. Our experience has demonstrated that this is more than adequate given the real level of risk in our public policy forums.

So, what are the risks of pre-moderating comments? Frankly, that you will deter a very large proportion of your community from joining the discussion which will have the combined effects of skewing the results and failing to meet the community engagement objectives – one of which, by definition, is to involve as broad a cross-section of the community as possible in the conversation. Can you imagine a town hall meeting where people had to whisper their comments to a moderator before being allowed to speak up? Would you join in?

The views of the community are not a problem – the problem is those who don’t want those views to be expressed without being filtered first. Because no matter how good your intention and no matter how much you really believe that letting the community talk freely is a risky business, to the community your filtering will feel like censorship.