Comments on stories

[somjournal.livejournal.com]

We at the Somerville Journal have been trying to kick the tires of our commenting system at www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/

As you may know, we had to shut down the comments because they were out of control. Now we’ve put up a system where you register your email in order to comment.

The benefit is, if someone is out of control, I can ban you, and the rest of us can have a conversation by commenting on stories. The bad news is, a number of folks have not commented since we put the new system in place.

You’re logged in here already – so I’m guessing logging into a website isn’t a problem for you. Can you log into Wicked Local Somerville without a problem? Is logging in to comment at a newspaper too much? Is there just nothing to comment on lately?

Thanks for any advice you can give – Kat Powers.

Comments

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

I hope you ban the IP address and not just the email.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

Will you consider someone who criticizes the paper or a story as "out of control"?

That's not out of control

[somjournal.livejournal.com]

Saying the paper or a story or a reporter is bad is not out of control.

Insulting the first baby of the year because he/she is not white and born to folks who grew up in Somerville is out of control.

Re: That's not out of control

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

I agree. Just in the past we've had members here link to comments where someone criticized a story for being irresponsible and the response from the paper was rather rabid.

Re: That's not out of control

[ron_newman]

Are you sure you're thinking of the Journal, rather than the News ?

Re: That's not out of control

[somjournal.livejournal.com]

The Journal was? I'm sorry for that -- we all have bad days, but it is my hope that myself and my folks here take criticism better than that.

Re: That's not out of control

[ellf.livejournal.com]

Ron,

Which paper was it that went nuts on you without cause? Was it the News, as your comment suggests?

Re: That's not out of control

[ron_newman]

Yes, that was the News.

Re: That's not out of control

[fantastic-salad.livejournal.com]

can we have more details?

Re: That's not out of control

[ron_newman]

Not really, because the News deleted the entire comment thread where the editor (James Norton) did that. You can try to reconstruct it from here or here.

But let's not hijack the Journal's thread to talk about the News. OK?

[mattdm.livejournal.com]

That's not so practical in an area where it's very likely that multiple people are using the same pool of dynamic IP addresses. (I.e., a different comcast customer gets banned one week, and both of you reboot your routers, and suddenly you're the one banned).

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm...I know that's what most message boards do to keep a tight leash.

[mattdm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it can work if you don't mind a certain amount of collateral damage.

[cos]

Requiring login is a very signficant barrier to participation, not because it's particularly hard or something that people really don't want to do, but because relative to not requiring login, it's orders of magnitude "harder". In particular, it requires the would-be commenter to stop and think, "do I want to create and remember another login? is this a site where I expect to comment in the future?"

You've added two barriers:
1. before commenting, the person has to stop and think, and may decide not to bother if they don't care too much

2. instead of deciding whether they want to make this comment, people are asked implicitly to decide whether this is a site they want to comment on regularly, because that's the implication that comes with creating an account. If they aren't ready to decide "yes" on the latter question, then a "no" decision on the former question has been made for them by default.

As you've seen, of course, not requiring login has plenty of drawbacks too. But you have to accept that if you require accounts, you will cut down commenting activity by a very significant amount (at the very least, to less than half of what it was, but more likely, to well under 1/10th of what it was).

There are some middle ground solutions, such as requiring CAPTCHA for commenters who aren't logged in, or allowing effort-free anonymous comments but keeping them hidden until approved by an admin.

Edit: And of course there will be some percentage of people who won't do it because they don't want to give away their email address, maybe because they think you'll put them on a mailing list or might leak it to spammers or whatever.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

Can you log into Wicked Local Somerville without a problem? Is logging in to comment at a newspaper too much?

Kat,

If you want to make it easy for readers of davis_square to comment on journals over on your website, the single most useful step you can take is to implement OpenID (http://openid.net/) on your site (or rather, get the technical people at GateHouse to implement OpenID for you).

OpenID means that readers who visit from LiveJournal won't have to register new accounts; they'll just log in with their fully qualified LiveJournal username (e.g. hakamadare.livejournal.com for me), enter their LiveJournal password to authenticate, and then post. This works because LiveJournal provides OpenID service automatically (http://www.livejournal.com/openid/) to all users.

Note: this does not mean that your site will be storing people's LiveJournal passwords!

You should be able to impose all the same access controls on an OpenID as on any other user account. There's an additional advantage: if someone wants to make trouble on the comment boards, and you ban his email address, it's easy enough for him to get a new one (via Gmail, or Yahoo, or any number of free providers). A person may be more hesitant to risk his LiveJournal identity being banned.

If you have further questions about this, feel free to reply to this comment or send me email (hakamadare@livejournal.com (mailto:hakamadare@livejournal.com)).

-Steve

P.S. Allowing OpenID login will be useful for people other than LiveJournal readers; there are a number of free OpenID providers out there, and people are using this technology more and more in order to avoid the hassle of creating hundreds of individual accounts as they move from site to site.

[cos]

For example, Estonia has a government-run OpenID provider that gives every known Estonian citizen an OpenID. If you want Estonians commenting on the Somerville Journal blog, that'd be a boon :)

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Heh...message boards are like Vietnam. Who knew?

[uberjay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I was just going to suggest.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Seriously? HA! That's great! I wonder how paranoid they are about being spied on.

[progressnerd.livejournal.com]

Requiring email registration is necessary, in my opinion, in order to have a civil discussion, unless you want to be overburdened pre-moderating every post. That was a good move. I just tried out the commenting system for the first time and have some suggestions.

First, the registration form "requires" first and last name. I'm not sure this is necessary. It could be a deterrent for those that don't want their employers and the world knowing their thoughts on a particular topic. Would a city employee would put their first and last name in there? (that was rhetorical). The site already requires a username tied to the email address, which brings a level of accountability to that name, even if it's not one's real name. Case in point: this LJ site. A nice "balanced" approach is to allow a generic nickname along with a note to the effect "real first and last name preferred but not required". Moreover, there's no way to "require" their real first and last name, because you'll never go through the trouble of checking it. And those that really want to stay pseudonymous will either not comment or lie, and you shouldn't want either.

After I logged in to comment once, the site continued to prompt me to log in on each subsequent story I viewed. The Journal should at least remember that I'm logged in for a short duration (1 hour?) like most other sites. It should also remember my username for me permanently (via a cookie) and just prompt me to enter my password each time. You need to lower that threshold of work in order to comment.

Blogs and online communities grow organically and gradually, and time is sometimes all that's needed. So I would implement my suggestions above, continue to remind people through the blog that they can comment on the stories, perhaps link from the blog to a particularly interesting story comment every so often, and just wait.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I have never commented on the Somerville Journal. I don't even live in Somerville, but mostly I feel like comments to news stories are rarely value-added. If I have something I really need to say, I can fire off a letter to the editor. I guess maybe I read FARK for too many years and don't care to see every newspaper turning into it.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

I wish to second cos' comments. Requiring logins forces me to create yet another login when I'm doing what I can to reduce the number email address/login/password/other data tuples that I have. I have to create yet another email address. I typically have to come up with yet another user name. And a password. I have to fill in yet another form asking for more personal data than is actually needed (and then I have to decide if I want this entity to have real data on myself or if I wish to create yet another completely fictitious persona, the more info asked for, the more likely I create a new persona). It has to be really worth it for me to go through all this hassle. This is all such an annoyance that there are websites devoted to sharing logins to news sites (along with firefox plugins to turn the whole thing into a one click process).

If I wanted to make an inflammatory comment it would actually be easier for me because I wouldn't have to save all my new login information. I have many IP addresses to work with and as many disposable email addresses as I'd like.

[cos]

Requiring a first and last name also makes some cultural assumptions. Somerville in particular has a very high percentage of its population from other countries. Not all of them have "first" and "last" names in the same way Americans and Europeans do, and this is a common source of problems on the web because so many web sites assume it.

If you want a "real name" then ask for it, but make it one field and let the person decide what to put there. Your assumptions about how many "words" are in their name, and what order those go in, are not necessarily correct, and if you're not making assumptions about those things, then there's no need at all to ask for first and last separately (except to confuse or intimidate people from some other cultures, because they'll think you *do* make those assumptions).

[jkao.livejournal.com]

OpenID.

Or some means of allowing anonymous comments.

Why would I want to register yet another login at your site?

[jadelennox]

Agreed 100%. Very few places inspire me to register. Though I do use OpenID on registration-required sites, and happily.

[ron_newman]

I didn't have any trouble registering, but I'm having a lot of trouble leaving a correctly formatted comment. Take a look over here. Your system totally mangled my HTML, and then it deleted my comment a few minutes later.