Forum Communications Zac Echola said the only way to deal with comments is to get your hands dirty.

By that he means you have to interact with the public, but that doesn’t necessarily mean spending large amounts of time on comment moderation. I’ve found by interviewing different people that beat reporters and bloggers who interact with users tend to keep things cleaner and more on topic.

Forum Communications allows it individual papers to decide how they want to handle comments. Some are very hands on with moderation, while others are more hands off. Echola believes you have to pick a method and stick with it. He has noticed some publishers and editors spend a lot of time nitpicking over which comments to approve.

“Comments are one of those things that if you want to, you can let them take up a lot of your time,” he said. “Personally, while I think we should engage and should work in some sort of way, discussing things with people on comment boards, I don’t necessarily think it has to be this thing that has to be constantly monitored and constantly watched.”

That’s an interesting take on comment moderation. A lot of newspapers choose to go the other route, spending a lot of time on moderation but very little time on reader interaction. While the latter method may keep comments PG, it won’t help foment strong conversations.

Echola has some tips for spotting suspect comments quickly and easily. Comments that are in all caps or are all lowercase are often written by trolls or are probably a personal attack. Really long and really short posts also are a red flag for Echola.

Echola discusses these points and much more.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.