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Ventura County Star restores story commenting with new safeguards

A week after turning off user comments on stories due to too many abusive remarks, the Ventura County Star website has restored commenting with stronger rules and safeguards.

Can allowing users to comment on stories work?

Here's what the site did to try to prevent continued abuse:

All comments are routed through our online registration system. A script attaches the registered name to the comment. It also allows us to identify the email address that was used in registration. (And thanks to our friends at our sister newspaper Naples Daily News for doing this for us.)
That allows us to contact via email anyone who files objectionable comments. If they persist, we can block their registration in addition to blocking their IP address.

If we send them a warning and find their email is phony, then we ban them for violating the Terms of Service.

It also creates a self-regulating factor for many of us. By forcing people to use registered names (which should be their real names), we invoke the "Mama's listening" rule: Don't say anything you wouldn't want your mother to hear.

We've also attached a basic profanity filter which will allow comments to be posted, but replaces the growing list of profanity with asterisks.

And we are encouraging, imploring and, yes, empowering readers to police themselves. We're asking them to contact us immediately if they find objectionable posts. And we are still investigating the model of volunteer moderators (maybe not as extensive as Slashdot).

We recognize that the persistent ones can find a way around the wall. At least now they'll have to work at it a little harder. We've committed to devoting some initial staff time in the coming weeks to monitor the comments. We'll work hard at keeping them away. Our hope is that we'll spend less time doing that and more time working to grow and enhance the site.

The goal remains the same: Create a home for civil discourse stemming from today's news. We don't want to control the discussion; we want to make it open and free flowing and comfortable for everyone to participate.

Discussion

2 comments about 'Ventura County Star restores story commenting with new safeguards'

Although he's too humble to admit it, Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman of TCPalm.com, was the one who actually fixed the Star's system, not the Naples Daily News. We use the same code at TCPalm.com for our user comment system.

/Full disclosure: I work at TCPalm.com.

Posted by Will at May 30, 2005 9:55 AM

Jon, thanks for the update. Though surely the star isn't the pioneer here. As I'm quoted here-- http://www.digitaldeliverance.com/MT/archives/000559.html -- "Wouldn't it be handy if there were resources available to summarize best practices with news-site commenting techniques?"

Posted by Jon Garfunkel at May 31, 2005 6:13 PM

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