Most people probably wont “get” this, but as a resident of Blackpool I read the local newspaper, the Evening Gazette, in some form or other most days. Usually just to see which players Blackpool FC are interested in but cant afford and which planet the council leader is on this week.
It's tough work in the Gazette control room
Like all of the Johnston Press newspaper websites, each of their positive or opinion driven articles has a comments section. Articles about crimes that have allegedly taken place don’t get a comments section for obvious reasons.
When a site has comments, you expect the site administrator to keep an eye on them in case the site gets spammed or in case an all-out flame war starts: on some sites, such wars are encouraged! Still, the administrator will usually leave them alone until it goes too far and then may step in and instruct commenters to refrain from that line of commenting and perhaps remove one or two comments that offend the policies of the website.
On the Gazette it’s completely the opposite. It’s moderated by its users. No, it’s moderated by anyone. In fact even if you’ve never been on that site and don’t have an account on it (or any other Johnston Press site) you can delete every single comment from it. There is still an administrator skulking around somewhere because the odd post gets deleted by them, but the majority of posts are deleted by people that disagree with them.
Lately there have been a lot of articles for which every single comment has been deleted. I’ve tried deleting a few, and all you have to do is type in a fake email address, mash a few keys like “iojdiuoadjas” in the reason box and the comment is erased! Amazing!
But what’s the point in a comments system where any disgruntled person on the globe can delete them all at their leisure?
Answers on a post card..
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