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11:21 AM
Personally, I think that suggestion to remove reputation limit on commenting would cause problems.
Meta Stack Exchange: Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead? (Even the spam in posts is removed on MO slower than on sites with larger userbase. New comments are more difficult to spot, so removing the limit to comment would very likely lead to more spam.) I will add a reminder about the way to deal with spam in posts: What should I do when I see a spam post on MO?Martin Sleziak 5 hours ago
New comments being more difficult to spot could be fixed with a software patch, allowing viewing the most recent comments. — none 3 hours ago
I highly doubt that it would help that much. Here is example from today - a spam post for which it took more than 30 minutes on the site before it got removed. If the MO users are inactive in dealing with spam in posts (either they don't care or they simply do not know how to deal with spam posts), it's overly optimistic to think that they will actively be checking also comments for spam. — Martin Sleziak 3 hours ago
BTW it seems that various users have created some ways of getting to recent comments (probably from the API). For example, you can get the most recent comments for a particular site here: charcoal-se.org/blaze (Which I found from an answer here: Is it possible to view all recent comments?) And it seems that there are also various chatbots that collect comments as they appear on a site, like this one. — Martin Sleziak 3 hours ago
If a spam post stays around for 30 minutes that doesn't seem so terrible. It probably was gone too quickly to even get crawled by search engines. Staying around for days would be bad. I will defer to you about this stuff though. I'm not a real MO'er, just kind of a hanger-on. — none 2 hours ago
I will just point out that it can be easily checked that the spam post has already been crawled by Google before it was deleted: google.com/…
I cannot consider myself to be "real MO'er" for whatever reasonable interpretation of the word. Anyway, I still try to help, for example by removing spam posts when I see them. And the post in the first comment explains some experience with this on other sites in the network. In any case, if we want to continue this discussion in some way, let's do so in chat. (We have digressed from the original topic anyway.) — Martin Sleziak 7 secs ago
I will just point out that if somebody is interesting in more stats about spam on MO, some number for the posts the were caught by SmokeDetector are available in the dahsboard. (Actually, this was mentioned in this room before.)
 
5 hours later…
4:34 PM
Allowing comments without any restrictions would also very probably cause increased workload for moderators. (Since number of flags on comments would be higher. Spam/rude flags can be handled without moderators - but other flags on comments typically need some moderator involvement.)

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