CoPress

We were recently asked whether we knew of any good commenting policies that encourage good community participation and discourage attacks. Which newspapers/ news organizations do you think have the best policies?

NYU Local has an interesting approach in that they require first name and last name so that there's some amount of authenticity and accountability. The Daily Gazette at Swarthmore has a much longer, but straightforward policy that has fostered tremendous participation over the years.

If there's enough good responses, I'll probably synthesize the findings in a blog post. Thanks!

Oh, so you're not actually going to moderate comments at all? I think there's the option to only moderate the person's first comment on the website that might be more useful to you. If you moderate that email address once, then it will allow all subsequent comments to go through. What will your policy be/how will you define "spam" comments?

Just because a person leaves a good comment once doesn't mean they will all the time. As unfortunate as it is, there are many people who will not always leave constructive or considerate comments. For this reason, the online editor at The Campus reads all comments when they are posted, and if they are not appropriate they are unapproved. It is not prior review, it's like not using extremely incendiary comments in your paper and censoring expletives. Personally, we don't censor our commentors, but if they cross the line the entire comment will be pulled. Be aware — your newspaper can be sued for a comment on your site.

I'll toss a quick link into the conversation. The Air Force, of all folks has come up with a interesting flow chart. It basically details how to respond to comments.

I thought about adding the comments from the old site, but decided most of them weren't really worth it. If you can convince CP to give them to you, it shouldn't be terribly difficult, assuming you didn't reset the post IDs when you switched.

That looks like a trackback. I've blocked all trackbacks on our site. They're very bloggish, not newspaperish, and just end up promoting others' sites.

I think WordPress generally packages trackbacks with a "nofollow" tag so the search engine knows not to index them. The reason that Text Link Ads are valuable, which also raises ethical questions, is that they don't have the "nofollow" tag and therefore the websites that show up are paying to have their SEO and Google Juice improved.