It was with great trepidation excitement that we reluctantly eagerly announced last week that our unpopular popular readers forums will return, allowing people to attack the innocent and each other to weigh in on the issues of the day.
OK, so we’re a bit conflicted over the prospects of the the forums’ return, because we know all too well how it often careened out of control in its previous inception. Too many people and organizations were savagely attacked, often by writers who took great liberties with the facts and used the space not to engage in a civic discussion, but to flame others and demean anyone who disagreed with them.
Will this new forum be any better? We honestly can’t guarantee that, but we have taken some steps to help push it in that direction. The system has a built-in check, in which any post that receives three complaints (from three separate users) will automatically be removed.
We’ve also added our own brake on the forums: If we receive five complaints about over-the-top user posts, we will block that user’s ability to post. That means users have to follow some basic rules of civility. See here for the full list of rules. Most of those rules should go without saying, but there they are.
Will that involve some subjective decisions by us? Yes, but believe me, if the past is any indication, it’s not that tough to determine that a post or a poster is over the line.
The forums could be a great community sounding board, but in their past incarnation they were taken over by a handful of people who were routinely abusive and inappropriate. We’re going to do everything we can to keep that from becoming the norm again.
I really do hope that people who want to engage in constructive dialogue will weigh in and that they will help us maintain some semblance of that in the forums.
(To create an account to use the new system, find the “Reader Reaction” box at the bottom of any local story. Click on “From” and choose a service with which to sign up by checking the box next to the name of the service. Doing that will cause a link for the service to appear on the screen. Follow the directions in the link.)
