SITE NEWS: A Few Comments On Comments

We're fortunate here on BRB to have such an wonderful commentariat: it's active, diverse, and does a great job regulating itself.  For SBN's football blogs, we have one of the highest comment rates, and that's been fantastic as it speaks to our openness and intra-blog relationships.  We don't have many issues with hate speech, personal insults, etc., so thank y'all.

However, this has been a heavy volume year for trolls and sockpuppets on BRB, and I've been trying to think of ways to address these problems.

As far as sockpuppets, y'all normally don't see those.  We have some insight on the back-end (giggles), but most of them, sadly, have been BRB commenters who have gone too far with comments and don't understand a "cooling off" period.  Believe it or not, we don't really like banning people at BRB, but we do use timeout occasionally.  If you are put on a temporary ban, please do not take this as a time to create three or four sockpuppets and try to come back.  Sockpuppets are an instant ban, period.

Trolls, on the other hand, have been out in force lately.  Generally speaking, some of this increase is due to playing the Cokeboys.  Clearly, beating us in Houston Arlington in overtime is the team's grandest achievement since 1996.  Many of these trolls don't even sign-up for their home team's blog, just for BRB, which is weird to me.

Here's what I'd like from you, BRB.  First, please don't feed the trolls and/or sockpuppets.  Don't respond, don't name call, etc.  Secondly, flag their comment and have fun with your comment there.  In our dashboard, we can see flagged comments, and we can ban users and delete comments as necessary easily there.

About 25% of our new user sign-ups lately have been spammers.  I'm able to catch most of these quickly, at least.  As with trolls, flag and move on, and we'll ban later.

One final request: the biggest single complaint I receive is regarding blasphemous comments, and I've been deleting these often lately.  Please watch these types of comments moving forward.

Questions?  Comments?  Deep thoughts of your own?  Drop 'em in the comments below...so I know who to ban next.