A few weeks ago, I had one of my periodic head-explosions over Journalist-types poncing about over how hard civil and substantive comment is to maintain on news sites. This is a topic that really frustrates me, because I think it’s really easy. And for any of the other myriad mistakes we may have made at PegNews, this is one thing that I think we’ve gotten right.

Patrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org was doing a good job of bringing in best practices in a Twitter conversation that turned into a great article on Poynter today. As part of that, I sent him a lengthy missive on our comment practices that was way too much to fit in a roundup piece. So, for posterity, I thought I’d share it here:

First, some relevant background on the scale and comment results we’ve got that make me think we’ve got some practices worth following:

PegasusNews.com does about 450k unique visitors/month. Registration is optional to read content, but required for site features like commenting. We have about 23,000 registered users.

Since 2007, we’ve had 55,867 comments posted. We have removed 268, or less than four-tenths of a percent. The vast majority of those removed were spam. I’d say we’ve removed fewer than 75 over content. I’d say that a third of those were originally posted by staff (whom we hold to a higher standard). And while I won’t say every commenter is deserving of a Pulitzer, comments stay pretty civil, on-topic and often provide our best story tips. That’s why I get so frustrated when I see people acting like commenting is beyond the ken of a news org.

We do have stories about the controversial topics mentioned that others eschew. We occasionally post a reminder that real people who have been hurt are involved and to show some sensitivity and everyone plays ball.

As to practices, I can’t point to any single one that makes it work. It’s a synergy. So I’m not claiming originality or best practice on all of these, but here’s how we do it:

• Commenters must register, which requires providing a valid email addy and clicking a link in an email.
• Users can optionally become verified by giving a little info including real name that we confirm with a quick phone call. They are marked as “verified” on the site.
• Comments then link to a more robust user profile that for many includes lists of favorite events, places, etc. and a comment history.
• Users have the options of picking an avatar that appears beside their comments. The only avatar we’ve ever had to remove for obscenity came from an online security company trying to sell us their services.
• We have a basic profanity filter.
• Whenever a comment is removed, it is left with a placeholder saying “This comment removed by site staff.” It NEVER just disappears. And in every case, that removed comment is immediately followed by a comment from the staffer who removed it explaining why it was removed. This tells people that we are paying attention and participating. We even do this on Spam.
• Users can flag comments for removal, which sends a note to our customer service team. (6 people and includes me.) Usually people flag because they disagree and not because it is objectionable. Rarely do flags yield a removal. If we get a lot of flags on a comment we aren’t removing, a staffer posts a comment explaining why.
• New users comments go live immediately, but their first three comments are emailed to the customer service team.
• If we decide a user is regularly on the line, we mark them as “sketchy.” All that means is that all their comments get emailed to customer service.
• If someone asks a question in a comment, a staffer answers it within 24 hours if no user does.
• Staff writers monitor comments on their own stories/beats. When staffers comment, they are labeled as “staff.”
• We have in our back-end admin a view of “lonely commenters.” People who posted on an item and have gotten no response whatsoever. We used to monitor that daily, but quit bothering because it almost never happens.
• When logged in, staffers can see email address and IP on every commenter. When we see what look like shills and we can prove it (5 drive-by commenters posting positive reviews on a restaurant from the same IP), we call them out without revealing their private info, but do not remove the comment.
• Because of all of the above, regular users get an education on what is acceptable. Even a casual reader fairly quickly figures out that we’re paying attention and participating, which makes all the difference.
• And even though our staff makes fun of me about it, I am abso-freakin-lutely convinced that the submit button on comment previews makes a big difference.

It's a speedbump, not a wall.

And no, this isn’t time cost-prohibitive. No individual spends more than a 20-30 minutes a day on comments.