Discourse: Discourse is an open-source free software based around building strong communities that can act as a natural immune system for defending against trolls, bad actors and spammers. Discourse allows the most engaged forum members to assist the governance of the community. Abusive comments are highlighted for the moderator using a low-friction flagging system and constructive comments are constantly encouraged using a system of likes and badges.
Disqus: This free software allows the audience moderator of any given news site to identify trolls, spammers and other users posting abusive comments through a user reputation system, which is also used for automated pre-moderation software in case the moderator wants to enable it. The software also allows the moderator to temporarily block users and send a notification informing why and for how long, or issue a permanent ban.
Facebook’s Comments plugin: This plugin lets Facebook users post a comment on content on a media’s website using their Facebook account. The comments plugin also includes built-in moderation tools and social relevance ranking. The comments posted on this plugin have to follow the community standards of tech platform, as well as those established by media organization itself.
Talk: it’s open-source commenting platform developed by The Coral Project, now part of Vox Media, it was initially founded initially founded as a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation, the New York Times and the Washington Post, with a grant from the Knight Foundation.
As an open-source software, you can download it and install it. Used by major news outlets in the US, according to the developers, Talk was designed after talking to 150 publishers to build a community system specifically for engagement. Newsrooms can:
- Feature and reward the best responses
- Connect user data to existing subscriber/donor databases
- Reward subscribers/donors with badges – or restrict commenting only to them
- Select difficult topics for pre-moderation only
- Change how the comments function on different parts of the site
Viafoura: This paid software is used by several media organizations. Viafoura offers an automated moderated system using machine learning that upholds the media’s community guidelines and detects and eliminates spam, foul language, abuse, personal attacks and other uncivil comments before audiences can see them. The company also offers the possibility to outsource the manual moderation through a dedicated team of content analysts 24/7 on top of the automated moderation system.