I am thinking of switching away from disqus and going back to hosting the comments ourselves. disqus has many limitations and I think if we have comments back in our control I can customise to suit our needs better. On average we get 10,000 comments a month so it can be a real challenge to manage such a volume. I know removing upvotes was not a popular decision. The reason we did it was to stop the spam bots but …
Last week we were on holiday in a caravan park in Scotland. During a rant about net curtains one of our party remarks that I have very strong opinions. I really dislike net curtains. In this particular case, I was particularly irked that the net curtains were obscuring a beautiful view of a Scotland Lough. The strange thing is I have strong views about small things but generally ambivalent views about big things. I care not a jot about the …
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 …
Slugger is one of the very few places where you can have civilised chats about contentious topics. It is essential to give people a voice; to share their opinions without being shouted down. We have noticed an increase in toxicity in the comments of late. I know with the pandemic tempers are frayed. But there is no excuse for some of the behaviour: it is just bad manners. There’s an agreement that in these stressful times we all need to …
The comments are an extremely important part of the success of Slugger. Many sites are turning off comments as they are a pain in the neck to moderate but we believe it is important to give you all a chance to give your views. We are currently getting over 10,000 comments a month on slugger which I think you will agree is quite a lot. Trying to moderate so many is like trying to take a drink from a firehose. …
Just a quick reminder: Slugger has a comments policy. Personal insults, smears and rudeness are not supposed to be tolerated here and we try to stay on top of this with the ‘delete’ key as much as we can. Normally, Mick picks up a lot of this kind of thing, applying his patience and charm (virtues that not all of us are blessed with). But Mick’s away at the moment and not able to get involved. We know that a …
