On comment abuse

On comment abuse

Posted Nov 20, 2003 15:26 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
Parent article: On comment abuse

I've seen a number of suggestions which I think merit some comment. The point about folks like Bruce Perens commenting a large number of times in a single day, and the value of those comments, is significant. We certainly don't want to lose that sort of input. Further, if comment posting is restricted to subscribers only we might lose feedback from valued individuals who aren't subscribers. I don't know what the subscription list looks like, but anything that prevents comments from Linus, Bruce, ESR, RMS, or any other prominent member of the FLOSS community would be detrimental.

Turing tests for posting have a certain appeal, but they also have a very real drawback. Distinguishing a character in a graphic is impossible for someone who can't see, just as picking out a word in audio is impossible for someone who can't hear. Pretty much any scheme you can think of is likely to have some problem of this sort.

I like the notion of per-subscriber abuse reports, though if LWN becomes flooded with trolls that does introduce a DoS against the editors, as was pointed out. Something that doesn't require any manual intervention would be ideal. Whether that's possible or not is another matter.

Since I've been mostly negative so far, I should probably make a suggestion of my own. I like option 4 the best, but I think it could be done without a preference flag (which benefits those without an account and might encourage them to subscribe). With a little bit of scripting, comments from non-subscribers could be present but collapsed, possibly with date and poster shown. A toggle could switch between subscriber-only comments and all comments, possibly on a thread-by-thread or whole-article basis. This would, of course, have to display all of the comments in browsers without scripting, but if most people have scripting enabled then the trolls won't get fed.

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