Slashdot Mirror
When Should a Website Edit Its Users?
rw2 asks: "Can a weblog edit users comments without opening itself up to liability in case of a slander suit? I run a political weblog and have a policy similar to slashdots in terms of the comments posted belonging to their owners. I'm worried about instituting something like lameness filters as it seems like as soon as you start regulating what your users post you have agreed to edit them for other reasons as well. Can someone point me to a good resource on issues like this. Those of us who aren't owned by publically traded companies are better off avoiding potential problems rather than hire lawyers to help us wiggle out later." Honestly, this greatly depends on the type of weblog you run and the community behind it. I don't think a one-answer-suits-all-sites solution exists, particularly for the reason that what may be inappropriate for one site may be more than appropriate for others. What say you?
Practice editorial censorship on idiot comments made by g**ks with insufferable intellectual pretensions. Otherwise you're just going to have a lot of shrill cranks drowning intelligent commentary in their din. I mean, look what happened to slashdot when Bruce Perens was allowed to create an account.
You dont want that.
The hard core linux zealots take it more personally than the editors, IMHO. My posting a troll to Slashdot is to a Linux zealot what me dry-humping the statue of the Virgin Mary during Sunday Mass is to a Catholic.
If on the other hand you keep it quiet, find who is posting the crap, and just ban their IP address range you don't attract attention very easily.
The weblog will have 25% of the net nulled before I run out of proxies; that doesn't include Wingates, SOCKS proxies, and the like. So, why bother?That is just another part of the challenge. I can get around an IP block, if I have a real hard-on for posting to a site:
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