Comment moderation can be a drag. On larger sites it can even be a part time job. While WordPress has some pretty useful moderation rules available nothing beats human intelligence.

If you have lots of comments it probably means you have lots of commenters. Let’s put some of those extra brains to work.

Today we release Crowd Control. It’s free and available now in the WordPress repository.

Crowd Control modifies your comment area to add a little box to the top of each comment. Users can report comments as inappropriate with a quick click. When a comment has been reported as offensive by a couple of people (you can set the threshold) it’ll be sent back to moderation and we’ll notify you via email.

Under the hood there is a lot of intelligence and security checks keeping people from abusing the system and burying comments just to be mean.

It’s pretty simple but like a lot of things relating to WordPress commenting – it hasn’t been done right before. We’re willing to take the gamble that it is needed.

Go ahead and take a vacation

Let your users keep your comments area clean while you are gone. That’s why we called it Crowd Control.

We have lots of great ideas of where we can take this next, and you can get involved on Github. Crowd Control is already integrated into Epoch but soon it’ll be so in an even smoother way. The same goes for Postmatic integration. The moderation emails sent from Crowd Control aren’t the same beautiful (and replyable) ones that you get from Postmatic Premium but we’ll fix that up in a jiffy. Give it a week.

Download Crowd Control from http://wordpress.org/plugins/crowd-control.