Post nixes posts; hand-wringing ensues

Washingtonpost.com editors turned off user comments on a blog, as explained and covered best by Jay Rosen.

Pure-play bloggers and pundits seem quite foamed up about it, too. I'm not.

As a site manager over the years, I've had to shut down whole message boards, kill individual threads and posts, and deal with lawsuit threats aimed at my company or from one poster to another. It's just part of the business of running an interactive service, folks.

Yes, perhaps the site editors and bloggers made tactical mistakes that fueled a firestorm of hateful comments. But I would never tell a site manager that he/she must maintain an open dialogue past the point where that dialogue is no longer constructive.

Who decides what's constructive and what's not? In my view, ultimately, it's the entity providing the interactive service. Is there a risk in shutting off interactivity, even temporarily? Sure, people you want to participate on your site might go somewhere else.

A calculated risk, a measured decision. In reading Rosen's interview with the site editor, Jim Brady, it seems pretty clear he thought a lot about the steps he took.

Prior to the start of the Iraq war, I wrote a newsletter outlining the state of options for interactivity around news content. What I said about message board systems then applies just as much to blogware comments systems or any other Web interaction tool today:

Content-publishing sites deal with one persistent problem regarding message boards: policing them, with all the legal and operational implications. Do you fully moderate boards, meaning nothing goes out to the public until it has been screened? Do you "shepherd" them, meaning you watch but do not act unless you see something wrong? Or do you take a hands-off policy and act only if you receive enough complaints about bad behavior?

Moderated boards, if at all active, consume plenty of the moderator's time -- too much to manage, in some cases. If you moderate a board, you essentially take ownership of and responsibility for its contents.

The "shepherd" role, unless very clearly defined in posted terms of service, may not be precise enough to escape legal scrutiny if the question of who owns board content ever arises. It might, for example, if a board ever happened to contain statements that could be held libelous.

Many content sites take the hands-off approach, and make it clear in terms of service that users have full responsibility for the content of their own posts.

Miscreants can frequent message boards on any topic, but from experience, the hands-off approach seems to work best the more specific and non-controversial the board topic might be. Debating sports teams? Expect bad behavior. Discussing the traits of exposition, development and recapitulation in classical symphonies? Expect somewhat less bad behavior (though I've heard Beethoven zealots can get a little wild).

No matter what approach you take to board discipline, it won't work completely unless you have some way to uniquely identify each user that has permission to post. If completely anonymous users can post to a board, your only ways to restrict recidivists are to ban entire IP address ranges (which could lock out hundreds of users) or shut the whole board down.

And I'll add this: even if you require registration to post comments, losing that registration profile when you're "kicked out" had better mean something to a misbehaving user -- beyond just the risk that he or she will have to register again.

Registration that is tied to loyalty rewards, discounts, personalization or an array of content subscriptions (such as e-newsletters) creates profiles that have more value to the users. The risk of losing profiles like that won't eliminate bad behavior, but it will raise the stakes.

Update (1/24): From Vin Crosbie's post on effective news site interactivity:

Imagine the cacophony that would result if printed periodicals published unvetted, unreviewed, and anonymous Letters-to-the-Editor or Op-Ed essays. Yet we're now discussing how some of those periodicals are doing the equivalent of that online. Should there really be any surprise that many of those comments are scatological, obscene, or libelous? ... Indeed, those publishers and their new-media managers are being reckless. And if you think I've used too strong a word, poll newspaper libel lawyers and libel insurers.