In their effort to compete with the “internets,” the Virginian Pilot expanded its presence to include comments from readers on its PilotOnline site. Over time, they have learned what the rest of us learned a long time ago: there are some crazies out here:
Journalists like Fred Schecker, senior producer for HamptonRoads.com, were initially captivated by the power of “virtual” publications to connect newspapers to their communities and involve readers in finding solutions to community problems. But as Schecker discovered, some users “aren’t looking for solutions; they are trolling for a fight.”
Yep. And often it seems that those who are “trolling for a fight” far outnumber those who want to engage in honest conversation. Moderation of comments, another lesson the Pilot learned, is far too time consuming. But there are ways of controlling the conversation, with an eye towards reducing the noise, that the Pilot has not employed. Given that they have the resources to do so (and are not locked into the system that others, like The Daily Press, utilize), let me make a few suggestions.
First, I totally disagree with the notion that comments should be moved away from the article. If people cannot distinguish the comments from the article itself, the answer is to not move them to another place (a la The Daily Press) but to put a disclaimer at the of the article, instead of on the page where the commentor posts. This is the disclaimer that shows up on that page:
Comments solely reflect the views of and are the responsibility of users, not The Virginian-Pilot, PilotOnline.com or HamptonRoads.com. Readers may find some comments offensive or inaccurate. To comment, users agree to abide by posting guidelines. If you believe a comment violates these rules, please click the “flag this” link below each comment.
This information should be available to the reader, not the writer of the comment.
Second, put a condensed version of the posting guidelines in the comments window (in place of the information above). Few people are, in the heat of the moment, going to take the time to read the posting guidelines link. Take that “must follow” section as a start, but it needs to be shorter and less wordy.
Finally, give serious consideration to pseudononymous posters. When the new system was implemented, no longer were there choices to have first name + last name or first name + last initial as the name displayed. Instead, each of us were given the opportunity to have a username. Based on what I see in my own profile, the only legitimate item I had to put in my registration was my email address. If I’m a troll, I’ve got TONS of email addresses, even throwaway ones, that I can use with which to register. The rest of my information could be completely bogus and if you needed to track me down, you couldn’t. (And don’t think that grabbing IPs can save you. IP spoofing is nothing new.) I’ll bet if the Pilot looks at its stats, the number of vitriolic comments has increased dramatically since people’s names weren’t associated with them. That’s the nature of the internet – folks will say things while hiding that they would never say if their name was attached.
The internet can be a wonderful place to play. But a few people can spoil it. Careful consideration of how to make it attractive while keeping the crazies in check will make all concerned happier in the long run.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I resemble that remark! 🙂
Seriously, though, if one has a name like John Smith, revealing it is not a problem. If one has a unique name, revealing it can be dangerous. In fact, the requirements of one’s job may preclude doing so.
I didn’t say the whole name. The first name + last initial was fine. (And, while I didn’t explicitly say so, the first name and last name entries in the profile could be bogus, too.)
Vivian’s anonymous (or anon e mouse) commenters are somewhat different from the sort of anonymous users the Pilot attracts in that they don’t go out of their way to be jackasses just because you can’t look them up in the phone book. Actually one key difference I’ve noticed between political blogs and online newspaper publications is that often the people who want to use their full names on blogs are, if anything, more full of anger and hate and vitriol than anonymous or psuedonymous users. In a lot of cases folks got into blogging because they feel pretty angry about something, and they’re self-important enough to think that what’s missing from American public discourse is their individual angry tirades about how either liberals or neocons are ruining everything for everyone.
Which is another aspect in which Vivian’s blog thankfully diverges from what qualifies as “mainstream” when it comes to political blogging. I read this one because I can’t stand to read the others.
anon – for some reason, your comment (and the other one on the other post) got hung up in my spam filter. Sorry.
I think your spam filter kicks in when you have posts up about anonymous comments. Under your settings tab, click “Irony = off.”
Must be – especially since this one got hung up in the spam filter, too 😉
Not to brag- well, maybe a little – I’ve written or co-written some of the core modules that are part of Drupal 6.x. That’s the app the Pilot uses currently. I co-wrote some of the improvements to the Drupal commenting system (actually, I was one of many developers who helped with this, so I can brag only so much). Previous versions of Drupal did not even include comments as a core module. You had to download and install it as an add-on.
There is a “flag this” module that the Pilot could download and install, which was written by one of the other developers who worked on the newest version of the comments module. There’s also an ignore user module. There are enough modules under the community category, that I could duplicate the functionality of a site like Digg.
Still, there’s no way to ensure that a user would be traceable by way of their profile.
May I assume Drupal is a PHP app? What is on the back-end… Oracle, MySQL?
Rick – they are using the “flag this” module but as best as I can determine, it only shows up when a user is logged in. Not sure what good that is.
Drupal is a PHP app. It works best with MySQL, but you can install it on top of Postgre SQL. It’s easy to use out of the box, but not quite as easy as WordPress. Among blogging platforms and CMS platforms, it’s been around the longest.
It has a few idiosyncrasies. The biggest one, IMO, is that it formats URL’s as example.com/node/268, with a node number from the database as the end of the URL. There have been a few modules that addressed this, but the one that works well has been introduced only recently. Even that one required the author to add a node title manually while creating a post. Someone just earlier this year contributed a module to create a path automatically, based on the post title. It works very well now, but neither module is part of the core. You have to add it on. I think the lack of this feature in the core app is discouraging to new users.
But what I like about it is it’s flexibility. I can create any sort of node type that i want, pretty much on the fly. I can create a node type that is essentially a blog entry contributed by a visitor. This way, a visitor blog entry is displayed differently than a blog entry submitted by me. I can even build an RSS feed just for this node type, separate from my main feed. I could create a node type that permits any user to submit a raw link to an external page, with no HTML, and decide whether it’s displayed on the home page by default, whether the user can choose to have it displayed there, or even if it has to be approved by me to show up at all. I can even add a wiki, right on my site, or with it’s own subdomain. I don’t have to add a module for any of this, just create the node type, and Drupal will build the necessary database tables. This and a few other things simply cannot be done with any other blog or CMS platform.
This concludes this week’s edition of Sovereign Individualist Geek Corner. Tune in next week, for a captivating discussion on SQL queries. 🙂
Your absolutely right, Viv. It doesn’t show unless you log in. They could make this feature available to an anonymous user if they wanted to, though. The Pilot seems to restrict nearly all of it’s community features to registered visitors. The only one they permit anon users is access to read comments. Hey, they could prohibit that too, if they wanted. Drupal gives admins complete control over the permissions on every module, even down to the individual user, and individual node, if they wish. it really can be every bit as simple or as byzantine as the admin wants it to be.
Sounds like a typical Unix learning curve — kinda steep at first, but once you figure it out you can do anything. (This contrasts with the MS learning curve, which is shallow at first, but soon gets so steep the complicated stuff is impossible.)
I doubt too many political bloggers are going to learn PHP. Mind you, it’s a wonderful language for just such applications — tying a database to web pages. Heck, many banks and online stock-trading companies wrote the web interfaces in PHP. But learning PHP (and, I assume, SQL and some DB admin), may make that flexibility something that is used by very few.
Understand, Mouse, that to do the things I’ve described, no knowledge of PHP is necessary. Even adding a contributed module is just a matter of uploading via FTP, then placing a checkmark in a checkbox from the Drupal admin. Using it as a basic blogging tool is easy, right out of the box. It is slightly more difficult than WordPress for that function, b/c of the aforementioned oddly formatted URL’s, as well as the lack of a wysiwig interface for writing an entry or a comment. There are contributed modules that add these two functions.
That’s where the reality converges with what you said. The problem isn’t that political bloggers won’t learn PHP; they don’t need to know it to use Drupal. But at the same time, bloggers of most stripes don’t want to install any add-ons, other than a theme. No matter how easy it is to install. So, in principle, your point is correct. Bloggers will be loathe to use it, because to make it as simple as something like WP or Movable type, you have to add two contributed modules that don’t come with the core.
Still, I think it’s the best. Once you ad those two, and about, oh, three more modules, it allows you to do things that nothing else can without using PHP. So you can start with a basic blog, then as your visitorship grows, you can add funcionality and features without the need to install all new software.