Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Janesville editor sez, "Too bad, so sad, our delete key doesn't work."

As paraphrased by Retiring Guy.  ("Bravo," he adds.)

Link to March 29 Janesville Gazette Editor's Log, "Commenter's remorse:  Too bad".

Excerpt:   We will not grant people’s requests to remove their comments or disable their usernames.

We received a handful of such requests in the last few weeks and more before that, and the online staff debated how to handle them. We decided on this approach for several reasons.

We don’t have the staff or the time to respond to people’s requests regarding their comments or usernames. We have about 14,000 users, and they post about 10,000 comments a month. We have a hard enough time monitoring comments on controversial stories and responding to suggestions that comments be removed.

We don’t want to add to that workload by catering to people who second-guess or regret their comments or who fear being outed.

Think about the possible consequences and repercussions before you hit “Post comment.” If you are a little uncomfortable with the comment before you post it, you might be a whole lot more uncomfortable when you see it on the site and others have a chance to respond.

If you don’t want to get into a heated online discussion, count to 10 before posting that inflammatory statement
.

No comments:

Post a Comment