6/9/07

Good News From the NewsTimes Live!

Via HatCity BLOG:
It's about time...
Our reader comment section has and will continue to draw controversy about what readers post and what we choose not to remove from the site.

But to monitor what’s there, we are asking you, the posters, to help us out.

We now have a new feature that will allow posters to notify us of any inappropriate comments. To flag a comment as inappropriate, you must be a registered poster. You then can click on the red Flag as Inappropriate text posted in the comment section. An e-mail is then immediately sent to me, alerting me of a possible inappropriate comment.
Smart move...the quicker the News-Times remove the scum from their comment section, the better.

We will always be watching and hopefully it will work. I have no problems with people that put up differing views but some of the commenters, in the past, have crossed over the line from spouting not just views or lies BUT outright "hate" literature. Freedom of speech is a long toss from "freedom to hate." Some of the comments looked like the "Hail Mary pass of hate" there.

Kudos to the Danbury NewsTimes if its new mechanism works as it is hoped it will. We know they didn't write those comments, but the sooner hate is confronted head on for what it is, the better the comments sections there will become.

Also, kudos to HatCity BLOG for covering this issue time and time again, which probably helped make a difference here.

As a side note: If the NewsTimes had let us know in advance that they were planning on making these changes they might have avoided a few scathing LTTEs and Blog posts on this subject. WE ARE NOT YOUR ENEMIES, contrary to what idiots like Joe Klein would have you believe. We just want to help you get better at what you are supposed to do. We also understand that writing code to change features on an internet website takes time to test and implement. Bloggers do that all the time. Maybe some advance notice would be in order next time? Just a minor suggestion, because I hate to nitpick on your doing the right thing.

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