Tracy Press

Previously, I just read a few articles and drew my conclussion about the vularity of some responses. Now I decided to go through the whole thing (and of course UP the page counts) and wow--this site is rife with sickness and sick people. More than ever, I am hoping good folk will stand up and strongly encourage the TP to make some changes to ensure good and lively debate and not the bar-room, gutter trash (clear difference from Trash Talking) we must endure as part of the process on reading both the article on line and comments some may have.

I'd like to make clear that I am actually not an employee of the Tracy Press. I work for the company who develops and enhances tp.com, SolutionsIC. I also happen to be the lead developer on the site as well.

I am asking for further suggestions to help the TP themselves see what people want / suggest, and to give them more options when they decide in-house how to handle article comments.

Having a moderator team is a good suggestion, the only problem is setting up a system to make sure all moderating is done in a unbiased manner. Perhaps allowing moderators the ability to make things inappropriate, and than an admin (obviously a tp employee) approves or does not, the comment in question.

One problem I've encountered in the past with giving the public the ability to mark items inappropriate is that the feature is often abused in the same way that the commenting ability is. The same people leaving vulgar and rude comments will use the feature to mark down people leaving worthwhile comments. And as can be seen, the good people are often outnumbered by the bad.

And one other option, which would go along with any other system implemented is a better registration process. Perhaps one that requires a real email address, and validation of the account.

Keep um coming!!!

-Nick

The registration/validation idea is a good one and would reduce the amount of clutter. It's not foolproof, of course, but would be an improvement. For the casual poster, it would be nice to still allow unregistered comments, but to support filtering of those comments or an icon or other visual tag to indicate they are unregistered. The filtering would hide all of the unregistered comments with a single click by the end user.

I'm all for the moderator, but my issue in the beginning is that when I post something with my name someone else can come along and make rude comments under my name as well. I don't appreciate my name being used in that manner. Making postings annonymous is good too. I don't care if I get credit for what I say. I just feel that it would be a good idea to simply have to sign in for all aspects of commenting whether it be the forum or casual commenting. That way nobody can use someone elses name in a manner that is disrespectful or rude. Every person would have their own user name and it can't be copied. Your name is associated with your email address etc. It won't solve the issue of rude or vulgar comments, but at least it will be with their name and not mine.

you guys sure whine a lot.

Nick D.,
Just have someone from TP do the moderating. All news is biased in the first place. Let the staff at TP decide whether a comment is appropriate or not. I'm sure that a lot of the vulgarity and racial/sexual/etc. comments would disappear though.