For those who run any kind of online opinion space, the issue of reader comments gets to be an issue.
Over at the telegram, they get way more comments than any local blog and they have an ongoing issue with derogatory posts, spam and the use of sock puppet identities. They’ve also got a set of terms and conditions people have to accept in order to make comments.
Fair enough.
Around these parts, it’s been a live and learn affair. Initially, there were no comments. Over time, we’ve relaxed the rules so now anything posted as a comment shows up on the blog immediately. If you make a comment and post it, the thing should be there right away. Just as a clue, hit refresh or reload in case your browser doesn’t refresh automatically.
One category that gets deleted – after the fact – are comments that are clearly nothing but spam. That would be like the freighter one which just listed off a bunch of services. These are usually posted by people who get paid to drop spam comments into blog spaces.
The other category is one that is clearly abusive and possible defamatory. These are few and far between and there has only been one example of that within the past six months or so.
Other than that, just about anything goes.
This has been questioned a couple of times by people whose comments apparently didn’t appear. if you’ve followed the threads of those discussions you’ll see the simple explanation. And here’s the thing: you don’t have to take my word for it. You can post a comment and it will appear right away. Poof.
Other places do things differently. Some have no comments and others practice censorship. It’s called comment moderation, but in practice it’s a way of letting the blog author simply block any comments from appearing that don’t fit what - as experience shows - are usually entirely arbitrary criteria.
Just as an experiment, your humble e-scribbler tested one of those censorship sites. Two posts that were on topic to the the discussion were done using my own blogger ID. They didn’t appear.
In another case and on a different post, two comments were made anonymously.
Interestingly enough, the first one – which queried the figure 35,000 megawatts in a discussion of Churchill Falls got through. It also got a reply that the figure was what came from the original, i.e. the 1969, agreement.
The second comment pointed out very simply and succinctly that “Churchill Falls only produces a little under 6,000 MW”.
That one didn’t appear either, perhaps because the author suddenly clued in that he’d made a boo-boo. He acknowledged the boo-boo in a comment of his own but never made any reference to the second anonymous comment at all.
Comments can wind up being a pain for anyone running an online opinion site. Around these parts, the initial impulse to have no comments was wrong. Even anonymous posts can bring a huge value to the discussion at hand.
if comments are moderated, then things depend very much on the blog author. As experience shows, that’s often a case of saying one thing - we don’t censor – but actually doing something radically different.
Inform the debate or stifle the discussion.
It really is an either/or proposition.
-srbp-