Leaving a Comment? That'll Be 99 Cents, and Your Name 377
netbuzz writes "Anxious to lift a ban on comments brought about by incessant trolling and anonymous slander, a Massachusetts newspaper has begun requiring two things of online readers who want to leave their thoughts on stories: a one-time fee of 99 cents and a willingness to use their real names. Says the publisher: 'This is a necessary step, in my opinion, if The Attleboro (MA) Sun Chronicle is going to continue to provide a forum for comments on our websites.'"
Good Idea (Score:1, Informative)
Requiring real names is a great idea. There is a reason that newspapers have generally confirmed the identities of people who write letters to the editor before publishing those letters. The same should be done for on-line comments. The 99 cent fee, however, seems silly.
Re:Good Idea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RealID (Score:1, Informative)
I wish I could mod you Off Topic.
Fair enough (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to post anonymously and for free (although this is a one-time ninety-nine cent fee, so it doesn't exactly break the bank) then there are lots of venues in which to do so.
Different parts of the internet offer different ways to screen out trolls, with varying degrees of success and with varying costs and benefits. Some newspapers impose lengthy delays (and incur significant costs to themselves) on comment posting to allow for their own moderators to screen comments. Slashdot has a moderation system which is generally good at elevating comments supportive of our constituency's preferred varieties of groupthink, but which may handle less-popular viewpoints less well (even when expressed cogently, politely, and coherently, such views face a toss-up between up- and down-moderation), and which also allows well-written posts that don't appear within an hour or two of the story to disappear from the radar of most readers.
And this isn't exactly a new concept for newspapers. Are there any serious newspapers with appreciable circulation numbers that allow anonymous letters to the editor in their print editions?
See also: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com]. Maybe this is the right solution to the GIFT problem for this particular institution. I look forward to seeing if this is effective in improving signal-to-noise.
Re:if its a small town paper (Score:5, Informative)
(I'm the Systems Manager for a local newspaper, and also had to deal with administration of local forums) Even in my smallish town, the trolls are quite able to get around IP bans and more (many are still on dialup, but we have had some utilize proxy services, or SOCKS proxies - I knew I shouldn't have written that guide a few years back :P). Beyond that, we also get trolls who aren't even living in the area anymore.
As far as the rubber room, while it's a good idea, many papers don't have staff capable of developing systems like that, and are using CMSes not developed in-house. Hell, many small papers don't even HAVE a "web guy/gal" to manage the site. Still, it is feasible that it would function well once implemented.
Use an anonymous credit card (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.theprivacyguy.com/2007/03/30/anonymous-prepaid-credit-cards/ [theprivacyguy.com]
Posted anonymously...in the spirit of things.
Re:Good Idea (Score:3, Informative)
But the banks DON'T verify that... (Score:4, Informative)
> The 99 cent one-time fee is a great way to verify user identity by using the banking / credit-card system.
Yeah, umm... The thing about that is that they don't verify your identity. At all.
No, seriously you can get a credit card in ANYONE'S name [zug.com] so long as you're paying the bill. They verify the transaction, not the person's identity.
Re:Dept of Troll Prevention.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not filtering of different opinions, it's filtering of the trolls who post off-topic graffiti and goatse links rather than actually taking part in the discussion. OP was spot on. Slashdot's moderation system works because it has a huge army of visitors that can be tapped for mod duties. Most newspaper websites have nowhere near enough visitors to do this. Just look at the number of posts on a typical slashdot post and compare it to the most popular articles on a local newspaper: slashdot probably wins by an order of magnitude.
Re:Dept of Troll Prevention.... (Score:4, Informative)
Not just it's huge popularity - but it's moderator pool drawn from it's huge registered userbase. Larger, I suspect, than any but the largest of national daily newspapers - think the LA Times, NY Times, the Washington Post...
But that doesn't prevent trolling, it just moderates them below the average users viewing threshhold. (Browse at -1 sometimes, it's eye opening.)
Re:Irony (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Irony (Score:3, Informative)
The thing is, a lot of people's salary expectations are to have a salary. I really don't think there's a lot of people turning down a $40,000/year job because they're holding out for the $60,000/year job.
Re:Irony (Score:4, Informative)
That revenue model actually works for the Something Awful forums, where some members are cheerful about being banned, paying another fee, and being reinstated.