Onward, content site interactivity

We've had a good discussion on the online-news e-mail list in recent hours regarding interactivity, in particular user comments on news sites. Some highlights follow.

Ken Sands kicked off the conversation:

"Are we evolving to an online equivalent of letters to the editor, in
which people must stand by their words, with their (verified) name? Or a
system in which users moderate (or vote on) comments? Or perhaps a
combination of these and other elements?"

Eric Peterson piped in:

"... At this point, I think it's a pyrrhic battle for news organizations. You either pay someone to (for all intents and purposes) edit your letters to the editor, including the verification of the source, or you face the reality of the Wild Wild West that is the Internet. The former is expensive (both in terms of payroll and PR -- no newspaper wants to be accused of 'censorship,' Mr Leibling's admonition notwithstanding); the latter turns your Letters To The Editor or miscellaneous forums into the equivalent of a 1997 chat room.

"If I were starting from scratch, I would require registration before comments could be posted, and I would build a moderator system, possibly community-based for value received (a free subscription to the paper, maybe?). I would log, though not necessarily publish, IP addresses, and I would allow for the possibility that I might wind up blocking an IP address or two in the process of keeping the miscreants out. Another possibility is a pay-for-play system; let your paying subscribers (print or electronic) comment, and let the rest find another forum."

Then it was my turn. I said I think open message boards are more trouble than they're worth; however, user comments attached to stories still have some potential.

The content management system to which we're gradually moving Scripps sites supports user comments on any article-level content. Site editors can choose whether comments are on or off by default, or switch off comments for individual articles as they see fit. Bad-word filters are included.

Site participants must register before they can comment. At one of our sites, we started out publishing the "real" first and last names from the registration profile as signatures for comments. But that just encouraged people to put in bogus first and last names. So we settled on allowing nicknames as signatures but still requiring a first and last name on registration.

We can ban individuals by banning their profiles from commenting. I believe part of managing bad behavior is making that registration profile valuable to the registrant -- as the only way to view some content, enter contests, post comments, customize/personalize a site, get e-newsletter subscriptions etc. It stands to reason that users who don't want to lose those privileges might be less likely to put them at risk by trolling, flaming etc.

I also believe article comments are less conducive to bad behavior than general, open message boards. Most news articles tend to be transient, so a commenter's words don't stick around in a thread indefinitely, and comment "fame" is fleeting.

None of that, however, prevents all bad behavior. People don't always act reasonably, online or off. Short of full moderation, it's a good idea to make it easy for site participants to report bad behavior, and for site teams to respond quickly and fairly to these reports.

I'd like to be able to ban by IP and by IP range, not just for bad behavior but because some institutions (schools, businesses) have been known to request that we disallow computers in their networks.

Our other unresolved question is whether comments should be displayed inline, meaning in the same page with the article, or hidden window-shade style until opened, or linked off on a separate page. The system supports all options so it's a philosophical debate -- and I can see rationale for each method.

Most recently, the ever-reasonable Joe Michaud joined the list conversation:

"We're heading toward an approach where all submitted contributions are tied to a profile page (which the system creates upon registration). It will include all submitted content: classified ads, article comments, submitted columns, photos etc. The user can choose at any time whether to have a public profile page or not.

"On registration, the user can choose a nickname for posting comments. When posting a comment, they will have the option to choose which to use: real or nickname, and if they have a public profile page they will have the option of what to display there. Their town is displayed in any case. Non-public profile pages will be fully visible to staff for moderation purposes, spotting classifieds violations, etc.

"... We have seen huge benefits from inviting people to help build MaineToday.com, so our goals are to make that process as inviting as possible, which includes keeping the trolls at bay."

Agreed. What I'm seeing overall is that innovation in interactivity has less to do with technology development and more to do with product/service/business development. Smart Internet people already built or bought the key components for commenting, peer interaction, object sharing and community moderation. Now it's up to us to mash up those components with some good old human attention to engage communities online and off.

Update 4 p.m. ET 11/16/06: Steve Yelvington wrote in to online-news wondering why I limited the options to open boards vs. story comments:

"... If all we do is allow people to comment on our really great content then we'll deserve the obscurity in which we disappear.

"We need to stop assuming that we were put on earth to set the agenda and start using the Web to discover the community's agenda. That's the real value, so often unharvested on newspaper websites. Reporters and editors should engage in participative listening. The community conversation can help you make your reporting better, more interesting, more grounded in reality."

I replied:

"Yeah, I should have written more precisely. I wasn't trying to survey the whole spectrum of options, merely to contrast two methods I know.

"By 'open' I mean unmoderated, loosely categorized message boards, the kind you and I were wrangling with in the last decade. Poor signal-to-noise ratios there offset the freedom of unfettered interactivity in my experience. At least, they make open boards unmarketable to advertisers.

"With regard to story comments, I would never assume a newspaper has sole control of the agenda. But you have to admit, a lot of news stories -- even reported the old-fashioned, inverted-pyramid, shoveled-over-from-print way -- make pretty good agenda-setters for Web participants to start conversations. Witness the many stories, even incremental coverage, on our Naples and Evansville sites that spawn dozens of comments each in a registration-required environment. Maybe story comments aren't enough, but given the number of sites that don't do them at all, they're at least a start.

"(Worth noting: Even in that controlled environment I described in my earlier post, we have had complaints from local advertisers about comments appearing inline with stories. Some say it's still too risky to have their ads/brands appearing in that context. So the traffic generated by those efforts to engage communities, even when we attempt to manage bad behavior, is more difficult to market. Not impossible, not more trouble than it's worth, just more difficult.)

"All that said, I agree we need to invest more human effort just to listen, and really hear, what people say in online communities -- whether we operate them or not. We should be asking as many questions as we try to answer. And I agree there's plenty of middle ground we need to explore between providing wide-open interactivity and locking sites down to purely one-way communications."

Which takes me back to the last paragraph of this post before the update. The tech tools are easily available. The human effort is where we need to invest more.