Over the years a lot of sites have turned off their comments as they can’t be bothered with the hassle of moderating them, but we recognise the comments area is part of the success of Slugger. We believe it is important to give people a voice, but we have a problem – we have been too successful.
The current volume of comments we are getting is staggering. Over the past month alone there have been over 17,000 comments left on the site, and to be honest, at times we struggle to deal with this enormous volume. As you probably know no one at slugger gets paid, least of all the long-suffering mods. While the mods do an excellent job of keeping the comments area civil we need to start looking at how we handle comments to make the task more manageable.
The core problem is some posts just blow up. My post yesterday for example had over 700 comments. Terry’s post had over 1400 comments! Once it gets to this level it becomes completely unmanageable to both moderators and readers.
We are looking at making the following changes:
Mods have the authority to close comments on a post if they think it has run its course or nothing new is being added to the discussion.
Mods will be trimming comments more. We know it is very common to have a bit of banter in the comments or go off track, we don’t mind a bit of this but if it starts affecting the overall quality of the debate we will trim them. Please do not take offence if your comment is deleted, it is likely not personal, but more an effort to trim the fat.
More posts. I think we have gotten into the habit that every post needs to be 800 words of carefully crafted prose. In the early days of slugger most posts were very short. I think if we have more posts this will help to spread out the debate.
I am being perfectly frank when I say we are making this up as we go along, therefore we would appreciate your views on how we can improve the comments going forward. Slugger is a community and we do listen to your views.
Photo by Dom J is licensed under CC0
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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