Comment Limitations

A new guideline has been added to the Comment Guidelines to limit comment length and multiple comments posted on a single news articles to four.

We want to encourage all commenters to use our forums to discuss topics with greater depth. The local news story comments are just a starting place and they work best for everyone when opinions about the news story are shared. They do not work for communicating with other commenters.

Pre-moderating comments has spared the public from a lot of comments made in bad taste, and just downright nastiness, that other comment sections have. The commenters mentioned above are very passionate and do comment regularly and in general their comments get approved and are only rarely edited. Overall it is not the same people commenting on news but a large variety with more signing up each day.

The community is reading the comments and there is interest from people I meet about what I have had to delete. It has become a time consuming and difficult job but somewhat rewarding when both sides of an issue are able to speak their mind and argue with civility.

I welcome your help in activating the forums, linking to the forums in comments and enforcing the new guideline to allow everyone a voice and a place where better interaction can occur.