This past week, The Cavalier Daily launched the newest edition of its website. In the coming months, we will be exploring ways to integrate new features and include more opportunities for interaction with our readers.
Soon after our previous website launched last year, we published an editorial outlining a relatively laissez-faire approach to regulating user comments for the online edition. That policy, in essence, is reflected by the disclaimer that appears with the online commenting form: "The Cavalier Daily reserves the right to edit and/or delete any comments deemed to be in poor taste or unfit for publication, and to block users from commenting in the future. Please exercise judgment when composing your response."
More to the point, the approach we used in the past has been deliberately vague to allow for maximum flexibility on the part of editors in deciding which posts to allow. We maintained that readers who wrote comments in good spirit with the intention of contributing meaningfully to the discussion at hand should have nothing to worry about. According to the Sept. 28, 2009 editorial, "We certainly do not want to eradicate humor, strong disagreement or even a little absurdity. Showing respect for fellow users is important, however, and we maintain a strong interest in making sure that the discussion is constructive."
Although the spirit of that basic policy will remain in place, the managing board believes it would better serve readers to have a more specific outline of the kinds of comments we object to. We will continue to reserve the right to remove comments at our discretion if they are deemed to be distasteful or otherwise inappropriate, but such a list helps to standardize our approach and ensure that reader contributions are treated fairly and consistently.
The complete description will appear on our website, but the list of unacceptable actions includes advocating illegal or violent acts, using abusive or excessively foul language, making offensive remarks or slurs, spamming or irrelevant posting, soliciting or advertising for other sites or blogs and reposting similar or identical posts multiple times. We will also remove comments that are clearly libelous or those that attempt to impersonate another individual.
Going forward, the managing board will look for additional methods to keep online discussion engaging and to ensure that users feel as though their contributions are respected. One upcoming change will involve the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" feature that was added last semester. That option will remain, but instead of burying comments that receive a large number of "dislikes," we will now use a "Mark as offensive" label for that purpose. If users flag a comment, it will send a notice to the operations manager and online editor for possible burying or removal. The goal here is to clarify that we do not wish to cover up comments that are simply unpopular, nor those that offer opinions differing from the majority's.
To encourage online contributions further and continue fusing the web and print editions of our paper, we will now be featuring an online reader comment each day on the Opinion page. And as many sites move toward mandating registration before users can comment, The Cavalier Daily will continue to allow anonymous feedback. This method has its drawbacks, to be sure, but we highly value reader input and wish to make the barriers to commenting as low as possible. We enjoyed watching a number of thoughtful and sometimes humorous discussions take place last year, and we hope readers continue to let their thoughts be heard.
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