Site Suspends Comments For 'Cooling Off Period'
from the this-is-the-internet dept
Via Romenesko we learn of local Illinois news site Pantagraph.com that has suspended comments on local news stories as a "cooling off period" after it felt that the comments had become too uncivil. I'm wondering how this will actually help. This is the internet that we're talking about here, and once the comments are turned back on, I would imagine that they'll quickly return to the same level of civility (or lack thereof) pretty quickly. If you want to create more civil commenting policies, a "time out" doesn't do that. Putting in place better incentives does.
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Filed Under: comments, cooling off, trolls
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Heh.
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Seriously though, online flame wars are older than the internet, somewhere I have a box of logs from about 1980 or so with some pretty amazing battles (I was a spectator, not a participant).
A cooling off period may be enough to get the most strident drive by flamers to go away, perhaps encourage kids to move on to other things, but in the end, the comments will re-open and the issue still won't be fixed.
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WTF?!
Who the fuck are they kidding?
Stupid fuck-heads.
I could go on, but am too lazy.
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My local newspaper had a message board at one time, until things became too 'uncivil' for the editor.
Of course, his definition of uncivil was calling him out when he had a temper tantrum (Calling people who used the message board losers who lived in their mom's basement and were useless as customers as the did nothing but leach off of the free content that they provided when he did it was a-ok. Pointing out how unprofessional he was when he said such things, wasn't.). He was very quick to delete any article that mentioned his name, or any other newspaper.
What he was never quick to do was put a stop to the user arguments, even though there had been an influx of new members from a town a county over, who did nothing but infight and cause arguments.
As a matter of fact, when he closed the forum, most of the jerks had since moved on, and we were actually getting some rather good discussions going about the city.
You know, things that they could have used (and actually did use in one article).
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Lack of "offensive" posts = moderatedworthless site
Simple rule: don't feed the trolls. Which should have an addendum for the slow witted with internet access: "Ignore the trolls, too"
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A "cooling off period" -- suuure.
Heh. :)
"Anti-Mike" actually said something clever -- who woulda thunk it. :)
Seriously though: you did a hard-copy dump of a flame-war Ca. 1980 --- and then you *KEPT* it around? For almost thirty years? Why? Or is this a scenario where you were a sysop, and ran a local dial-up BBS or something?
If that's the case, then you should send those "logs" (or more exactly, digital COPIES of them!) to the guy who runs www.textfiles.com. He LOVES stuff like that.
But yeah, I actually agree with you on that one: the millisecond they re-open comments, the war will start again. Especially if they allow anonymous posting.
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Re: A "cooling off period" -- suuure.
I can't really say where it is from (without giving away a little too much of myself) but safe to say there were national multi-user systems with local dialup long before AOL, and even before the first of the BBSes (I remember the first BBS in Canada, most people would be hard pressed to name it).
Then again, I can remember when 110 baud was "fast". :)
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Moderation or voting
There are two really effective ways they can deal with that problem:
1) Have someone (or a team of someones) volunteer to weed out obvious trolling
2) Use a commenting system that allows up or down votes, like Disqus, IntenseDebate and Slashcode.
On any popular site, there will be regular visitors who care about it enough to slap down trolls. On something like a newspaper or other business website, they might be more comfortable having one or more employees to do that.
The exception is YouTube ... I don't even know what planet YouTube commenters come from, much less what would clean up their comments.
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Oh yeah. Zippy the Pinhead said that. So true.
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Indeed. It's something we're hoping to improve on this year...
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Jake, you pussy.
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So, yes, Mike, in some cases it would help.
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Cooling off period in comments
This is a place for penalties, and one way is to block anonymous comments (though allowing them to be published anonymously) and then blocking people who are uncivilized from the site.
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