We’re revising our comment policy. Here’s what’s changing

In January, we announced plans to revise our comment policy. You responded with your thoughts on the matter. Today, we’re putting the new policy in place.

The policy we’re leaving behind, which we introduced in August 2011, served us fairly well. In fact, that’s what most of you said in the comments on the recent post. You like the comment policy and don’t see anything wrong with it.

The editorial board is not making any major changes. The point of our revisions is largely to fill in some gaps that we feel have been causing problems over the last few months. Largely, those problems are the result of what we believe to be deliberate attempts to derail threads through trolling and comments which are unreasonably off-topic.

The basic elements of the comment policy are still in place. We have made a few minor tweaks to some of the language to clarify a few points. But regardless of the individual items in the comment policy, here’s the basic rule: be civil to one another.

We value the comment threads. And we’ve heard from you that you value them too. The reason they’re so valuable is because so many of you are dedicated to creating a civil, educational dialogue about how to build a better region. You don’t all agree on how to do that, and that’s okay. The dialogue is what is important.

The comment threads are not the place for vitriol and sniping. You shouldn’t be trying to prove yourself right, everyone else be damned. You shouldn’t be attacking someone because they disagree with you. Remember, you’re not going to convince everyone. When that becomes apparent, agree to disagree.

If you can’t be civil, you chill the debate, and that means that everybody loses.

So, here are the basic changes.

Trolls live under bridges, not under blog posts

The most common complaint you cited was trolling. We don’t like it when someone intentionally tries to disrupt the debate, and neither do you.

I’m confident in saying that we don’t have too many trolls in our comment threads. But there do appear to be some. What’s tough is figuring out when someone is being intentionally disruptive as opposed to merely being passionate about an issue that is very difficult.

As a result, we will probably deal with suspected trolls by watching for patterns over time. If someone disrupts several threads over a short period, we will consider holding their comments for approval.

I do want to be clear: Just because you disagree (or think you disagree) with the basic mission of Greater Greater Washington does not put you at risk for having comments moderated. We want comments from all sides of every issue. You will not be moderated for disagreeing. You will be moderated only if you cause disruption. Remember, be civil.

Stay on topic

We understand that many of you are more interested in certain issues than others. But just because you care deeply about one issue or the other does not mean that it’s appropriate to post about that issue in threads that are not about it.

Lately, this has been happening more often. Derailing a thread to talk about something off-topic makes it harder for people to talk about the issue at hand.

This doesn’t mean that we’re going to clamp down on anything even slightly off-topic. Sometimes threads do shift to related issues. That’s okay. But if your comment is egregiously off-topic or completely unrelated to the subject of the post, we will delete your comment.

Fair enforcement

Several of you also said that you wanted fairer enforcement of the comment policy. And we agree that having impartial moderation is absolutely essential.

Again, I can assure you that we do not moderate comments simply because we disagree with the ideas being espoused. And we are not more lenient for commenters who tend to agree with us. We moderate people from all sides.

However, much of our moderation is complaint-driven. Our moderators strive to review every comment. But we simply cannot read them all in a timely fashion, so sometimes attacks slip through.

That’s why we’ve created the “report comment” feature.

When someone attacks you, don’t respond in kind. Report the comment. Let our moderators do their job.

When you aggressively respond to an aggressive comment, you just make the thread devolve, and it makes it harder for the moderators to step in and get the thread back on track.

We will continue to strive for impartiality. But you have to help us. If you see a comment that you think violates the comment policy, don’t assume we left it there because we agree with it. It’s probably there because we haven’t seen it. Help us out by reporting it.