Stephanie Romanski

My newspaper removed commenting altogether. I want to bring it back but I’m facing several hurdles.

First, I will happily admit that my line of thought in the previous post about this was wrong. Offering the ‘Tweet this’ (which evolved into ‘Share this), link to our daily chat, link to letters to the editor submissions, and our forums was a failure. I took the line ‘If you’re not doing comments right at your paper, you shouldn’t be doing them at all’ to heart because we were not doing them right. We had limitations. Everything from crappy software to corporate restrictions and requirements.

I love commenting. I believed then and I still believe that allowing readers to comment on stories is valuable both for fostering the community we all so desperately want, and for generating traffic and pageviews. But I have grown wary of allowing anyone and everyone to comment anonymously. The years I have spent moderating and dealing with trolls, and getting phone calls from disgruntled people who know *my* real name, the threats, the damage done to my property – frankly it puts me off. And I no longer care about getting tons of comments. I care more about intelligent discourse. Quality over quantity.

To that end, I’ve heard again and again that the only way that will truly happen is by requiring users to register with their real names. But I’ve never found a commenting system that did that. Or one that wasn’t easy to crack and enter false info.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to think of using Facebook Connect.

This is what I’ve been mulling over all day today. I’ve been trying to look at it from all angles. Requiring readers to comment using their Facebook login, which (one would hope) is their real name, would ease my biggest problem: Trolls.  It might also appease my corporate folks who aren’t letting me put comments back unless I sit here and read/approve every single comment before making it live on the site (this is one of our holdups with returning commenting). Maybe they’d be agreeable to the Real Name aspect and let me just rely on spotchecking/report abuse flags as before.

I know one of the arguments for real name commenting is that anonymity does empower folks to say what they are really thinking (not necessarily anything troll-like) about a topic – it might give them confidence to point out something we hadn’t thought about. I don’t have a comeback for that. I think maybe one thing like this can be sacrificed if it means the level of discourse over all comments is raised.

What about folks who aren’t on Facebook? They are left out. Well, so are people who don’t have computers. Those folks can write a letter to the editor. To me, the Facebook option is a sort of weeding out process. And anyone who makes the considerable effort to create a fake FB account just to troll a smalltown newspaper website can be found and quashed pretty quickly.

Should Facebook Connect be the only option to log in and comment? What about allowing Twitter or Google Account logins? Possibly, but again, it runs the risk of the anonymity issue I’m trying to avoid.

What about the reader’s own Facebook security? Does logging into our site with it leave their Facebook page open to access by us? I don’t believe so, unless their profile is open to the public anyway. From what I’ve learned, Facebook Connect respects a user’s privacy settings.

Does this lead any of our traffic away from our site to allow comments and links to be carried on Facebook walls? I’m not sure. I’m still researching this whole thing so I’m not quite sure how it works yet. Even if it did though, is that a bad thing? People are talking about your stuff. Exposing our links to a reader’s entire friends list on Facebook only drives that much more traffic to our site as the come to check out the link.

I’m still a ways off from getting corporate approval to turn commenting back on, but I wanted to kick this idea around a bit. I want to thank @ernmander @bbelew @AnthonyMay @gmarkham @mathewi for their input this morning.