May 23, 2004, 09:01 AM
Our policy on comments
As many readers know, when we launched Chronically Biased a week ago, we had a comments feature. As longtime bloggers, Owen Courrèges and I felt that it was important for this weblog to have a comments feature.
However, we probably underestimated the number of readers we would have when Dan Patrick flipped the switch a little over a week ago, and that combined with unmoderated comments was threatening to: 1) severely stress out our server and software, 2) turn the weblog into a community message board, which was never our intent, and 3) allow some posters to put up offensive or hateful material that might stay up for hours before our editors had a chance to remove it.
As some of you know from my answers to your emails, I've not been happy about turning off comments, and I think we've come up with a solution that we're going to test for a while: Moderated Comments.
With our Moderated Comments system, readers can still compose and post responses to individual articles. The only change is that the comments will not appear immediately (so PLEASE do not submit the same comment over and over). Several times a day, our editors will go through and approve (or deny) comments that have been left. If approved, they'll appear on the weblog with a timestamp reflective of the time they were left by the reader.
Here are some general guidelines for comments. Comments that violate these rules will not be approved, so please keep them in mind:
- Profanity should be avoided.
- Personal attacks on our bloggers, other readers, or figures in the news should be avoided, as should “flames.” We encourage readers to share their views and even disagreements, but let's try to keep it polite and about issues.
- Comments should be related to the post.
- Comments should be short and pithy. While there's no hard and fast limit, comments longer than a couple of paragraphs should be emailed as a potential Letter to the Editor. Longer comments may not be approved.
The editors reserve the right to approve or deny comments at our discretion, but we will try to adhere to the guidelines above (which we may modify from time to time).
We very much appreciate all of your feedback so far, and we hope you'll make good use of this Moderated Comments system. Please be mindful of our posting guidelines, as we really hope to keep this feature.
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