Posted by djudd on January 5, 2010 at 8:05pm
As I move further into our new website, I'm very interested in opening the door for community bloggers. My bosses, of course, want some kind of clear policy in place governing community blogging, before we let people speak their minds on our site.
Can't say I really disagree with them, considering how easy it is to be sued in today's world.
I was curious as to whether or not anyone already had a policy in place for community blogging, or something I could look over to glean a few ideas?
Also, I'm really leaning towards implementing a workflow that leaves all community blogs in a draft state until approved by an editor, but I was wondering what other newspapers that allow community blogging are doing in this regard?
Comments
Two Approaches
There was a really good discussion on this at the topic "Blog administration and control for media site"
When it comes to any sort of user-generated content, be it comments or community blogs, there typically are two camps.
The first approach needs a good way to filter out most of the spam (usually a CAPTCHA module suffices), or spam-bots will flood the website. I see where you're going with the legal argument, but if that were true, then no site would be able to host a forum without getting sued. Some sort of short legal disclaimer would probably suffice if you are really worried about this. You'll also need to make sure that reported content is dealt with quickly, especially if its really offensive.
The second approach is definitely safer, and it keeps bad content from appearing at all, but it requires a lot more work from the staff. Also, if the moderation process isn't quick and responsive, it can hurt the site. If you take this approach, you usually want to take some steps to ensure quick processing of new content. Email notifications that go to the staff are really useful; you can also add a moderation queue somewhere on the site that staff can see.
In the USA ...
In the USA, our lawyers have advised us that moderating content before its published might endanger our standing under the safe-harbor provisions of the Communications Decency Act, so we do not screen any user content before it is posted. Your lawyers might disagree and/or you might be in another jurisdiction, so you should always consult with proper authorities.
On most of our sites, all posting is 100% open. On a few of our sites, you have to petition to become a blogger.
I think that far more important than your ruies and management approach is the question of whether you have a clear, positive mission that is fully supported by your users. If you do, you'll tend not to have many problems. If you do not, you'll tend to be dominated by morons with nothing better to do than post racist, abusive trash and attack other users.
Other Factors
Even when you have a clear, positive mission supported by users, I don't think that's the end of the story for newspapers.
Usually The Cornell Daily Sun's biggest problem is not morons, but human spammers who obviously know how to fill out a CAPTCHA form. One easy way to deal with that is to require commenters to register for a user account and then ban the spam accounts, but that leads to a lot less comments and user interaction, which is why I don't like this approach.
Plus, all it takes is one controversial news or opinion column for a flame-war to erupt, no matter how good your mission is.
Nonetheless, you have very compelling point about the Communications Decency Act, and it's certainly swayed my thoughts on the matter considerably. And I'd be curious to see how a good system for reporting abuse, coupled with a way to track trends in the IP address of bad comments, would fare if unmoderated anonymous comments were allowed.
Moderating in combination with "abuse" feedback
Hi,
This is an issue I have been thinking quite a bit about myself. I believe the biggest issue is to find the right balance so that users are not put off from contributing. When it comes to blogs, for example, users want them to be published instantly otherwise many will be put off.
As you say, this also has legal implications as moderating does put responsibility on the site owner for the content published.
The solution I am leaning at is to clearly stipulate in the ToS about what content is acceptable and what isn't and that the author of any user contributed content is responsible for what they post, even if moderated.
Then have a report button/link for each page where any user can report back to us about abusing behavior, copyright issues, etc. The ToS will stipulate our policy for handling these reports.
Do you think something like that would "please" the lawyers?
--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com
Comment removed by author
Comment removed by author
As of this time, we require a
As of this time, we require a registered account for any of our interactive features, including comments. The comments on our site died at first (I think 6 in the entire first week of our re-launch) and now they are about 50% what they were before, but in this case that equates to about a 95% reduction in the ones we just delete anyway, so we're back to normal for the most part. We do about 4,400 absolute unique visitors a day, and we have about 3200 registered accounts, so I'm satisfied with the results.
Our policy is not to edit, but to moderate. We never change the context of a comment, we simply delete it if it's unacceptable. In this way, legally speaking, we do not take ownership of the content, and we don't take responsibility.
I'm guessing the same would be true for community blogs, but I'm not sure. I'm just the IT Manager, so that decision lies higher up the chain of command than me.
More than anything, I was hoping someone had an example of written guidelines for blogging they already had in place, just so we can get an idea of anything we haven't thought of before going forward.