As many of you may have noticed, our comments threads were recently closed to new posts.
Last week, our development team had to deal with a group of spammers and comments were closed while we made sure the website was secure. This work has now been done but it did bring forward discussions across our various editions around the world about how we ensure that our threads are places where readers can continue to share comments and have valuable discussions, and that we have a better shared approach across all editions of The Conversation.
In the UK, our small team of journalists commission and edit articles which are then published on the site. Post publication, these editors are also responsible for reading comments to ensure they are respectful and constructive and they comply with our community standards. Given the size of the team and our capacity, it was clear editors couldn’t always give adequate time and attention to comment moderation. This has sometimes meant comments that do not abide by our community standards stay up for too long or are not moderated at all.
A network-wide decision was therefore taken to move from automatically opening comment threads on the majority of articles to opening them on fewer articles, which can be more actively monitored by editors. On UK articles we will endeavour to open as many comments as manageable for at least 72 hours. Your thoughts, engagement, contributions and discussions are incredibly valuable – to our editors, authors and fellow readers – and we think this approach will give an opportunity for this to continue under articles that we publish.
Our social media channels are also open for you to engage further with our articles: find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.