Good news, bad news on the comments boards
Published: October 27, 2010
This is a good news/bad news story.
The good news is that our new high school sports pages on the stripes.com website are a huge hit with readers. We have built pages for every DODDS high school in Europe and the Pacific, where you can find game coverage, schedules, team information and more. Plus, readers are encouraged to post their own team and game photos for everyone to see and share.
Best of all, there’s a place for reader comments on every game story, and these have grown so robust that they routinely top our list of “hot topics” (i.e., most-commented stories).
That’s the good news. It’s also the bad news.
Earlier this week, we had to shut down the comments board on a story about a controversial ruling in a football game between Heidelberg High School and Wiesbaden High School. The DODDS-Europe athletic director ordered that Heidelberg forfeit the game because of unsportsmanlike conduct, and that decision triggered a tsunami of ugly personal attacks on the comments board about the athletic director, other DODDS officials and officials from other schools that weren’t even involved in the game.
Clearly, a lot of people take DODDS high school football really seriously.
But we also expect our website users to take the comments forum seriously. We want to encourage an unfettered, free-flowing series of comments on our stories. And we rely upon our community of users to self-police decorum on these boards. But whenever we come across comments containing profanity, obscenities, racism or slanderous personal attacks, we are going to delete them. And when an entire comments board veers out of control, we’re going to shut it down.
That’s the bad news. But it’s also the good news. Because by and large, Stars and Stripes readers have proven themselves to be extremely responsible on our comments boards—much more so than users of most other newspaper websites. Stars and Stripes readers don’t hesitate to express strong opinions (check out any story about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law), but they do so with propriety and respect.
To which we say, Go team!
Due to a switchover to a new comment system, this comment board is now closed.
