The Washington Post And Blog Etiquette
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in BloggingThey’ve had some problems recently, and I certainly appreciate the sentiment…
What we’re not willing to do is allow the comments area to turn into a place where it’s OK to unleash vicious, name-calling attacks on anyone, whether they are Post reporters, public figures or other commenters. And that’s exactly what was happening. That leads into the second complaint. The reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making. We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people who refuse to abide by the rules we set out.
It doesn’t happen too often on Donklephant, but sometimes I ban commenters. Trust me, it’s something I’d rather not do, but to maintain a level of decorum here, it has to be done. I want this site to be a place where people from both sides of the aisle can share their thoughts freely.
What are your thoughts on our comments policy?
(h/t: The Moderate Voice)
This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 20th, 2006 at 9:39 am
But what they did is ban everyone.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I know, and it’s said to see it come to that.
And to that point, a fellow Donklephant contibutor, Michael Totten, recently had to turn off comments because he couldn’t moderate hundreds of them and weed out the trolls. That’s what the blogosphere is becoming and I fear it’ll happen here eventually. Jeezus I hope not, and that’s why I’m banning people left and right now so it’ll set up a precedent. Even longtime commenters have been threatened with being banned for throwing out particularly incendiary personal attacks.
I guess right now it’s simply a wait and see game for us, and it probably has more to do with whether we become a highly popular blog or not. That could certainly turn out to be a double edged sword…