> How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes?
Fluff will pass through.
Another option would be to enable the pending machine on big stories for the time they are on the home page, then auto-validate everything (but mark the unendorsed comments as such).
It would be nice if users with a lower karma could validate the replies to their own comments, once they have been validated.
I like this idea; perhaps it could be a continuous function. There's already some sort of velocity-like calculation, with a time coefficient, so stories have to kick increasingly hard to keep their heads above water. It seems logical to attach the posting threshold -- a new cooling saucer dimension -- to that same calculation.
Fluff will pass through.
Another option would be to enable the pending machine on big stories for the time they are on the home page, then auto-validate everything (but mark the unendorsed comments as such).
It would be nice if users with a lower karma could validate the replies to their own comments, once they have been validated.