Managing Newspaper Comments

   Well, newspapers have given in to regulating comments 
instead of supporting free speech.  Rather than embrace 
the opportunity to bond with readership they have tried 
to control their reader's comments.
   Okay!  What can they do?  Sure people take things to 
the lowest common denominator.  That's human nature and 
so many tests have been done that demonstrate how forums 
left to their own will generate into useless debauchery.  
Essentially what newspapers have done, while watching 
market share disappear, is work to regulate readership in 
their comment sections.
   There is a better way.  What newspapers need to do is 
to endorse community amongst its readers.  The best way 
to do this is to have a rating system where readers rate 
the comments from 1 to 5.  Each week the highest score is 
posted along with the best comment.  It might seem silly, 
I know, but it works.
   A common method media tries is to let readers report 
abuse.  It's not very effective.  I would like to take 
this a step further and involve community where the 
reported comment could be flagged and the original author 
given an opportunity to retract or make further comment.  
I would do this by changing the background color of a 
flagged comment and then automatically deleting the 
comment after a set period of time if no rebuttal is 
filed by the original submitter.  For economic reasons 
try letting this self manage for a while with limited 
editorial involvement.
  A third suggestion is a word filter.  I like writing 
this kind of code in Perl where it simply replaces 
offensive words with dashes or asterisks.  Granted the 
word list is limiting, and there are always clever ways 
to get around offensive words ('be atch' for example), 
but if someone uses the 'f' word they get a clue that 
they are inhibiting everybody elses free speech with such 
limited vocabulary and maybe after a time a word list 
could be developed that proves partially effective.
   I work cheap, I'm available and I want a job doing 
this.


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