Some notes on site policy
Everyone once in a while, it's a good idea to talk about what we consider the editorial standards at The Daily Gotham, in especially as far as posting and comments are concerned. It's my understanding that our friends at Room Eight are currently wrestling with these same questions, and maybe this will be helpful to them as well.
As to posting, we encourage our readers to sign up and blog their own content. This site is read by many influentials in New York, and your content here will get noticed. Unless we know you, however, we're not going to immediately give you front-page privileges. That's just the way we do things. But by all means, give it a go. Specifically, I'd love - love! - more coverage of Queens, the Bronx, Westchester and Long Island. I'd also love, but that's a question of my personal taste, more gay, Jewish and black-themed content.
To comment on this site immediately, also, you need an account. If you don't have one, your comment needs to be manually approved. So if your anonymous comment does not appear immediately, it's not that us sellout tools of the system want to silence you, it's that we haven't gotten around to moderating it yet. We're sorry about that.
As far as content is concerned, and that goes for both posts and comments, we have some simple, basic, common-sense rules. Slander and libel will get you banned immediately, no questions asked. Same with anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia and general wingnuttery. Basic simple concept: if you would not feel comfortable saying something in someone's living room, don't say it here. Ad hominems, also, we generally frown upon, unless they're funny. You are full of shit isn't just unfunny, it's not even very original. The only added value to a comment like that is to confirm our suspicions that we don't need to take the person making it seriously.
So yes, we encourage your participation in and enjoyment of our little venture here. We don't promise much, but we will attempt to make your experience here pleasant or at least amusing; which is why we have these rules.
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Metablogging | Administrivia | Community
Delays
Submitted by Dan Jacoby on 25 March 2007 - 12:43pm.
While I understand JAD's comment, I believe there are two things that need to be brought up in response.
First, sometimes the managers of the site are simply overwhelmed by the volume, or otherwise engaged (I don't know the economics of this site, but I'm pretty sure nobody makes a living off of it), so comments by unknown people take time to get approved. An attempt to put a "time limit" by which time comments must be posted or deleted is impractical.
Second, you may notice that you are listed not just as "JAD," but as "JAD (unverified)". This is an important distinction. The managers of this site know many of the people who post, and know when a registered user is posting who is behind the post. When someone is "unverified," that person may be perfectly legitimate (this is almost always the case), but occasionally someone can slip in with a phony ID.
In other words, anyone could be "JAD (unverified)," but I, for instance, and the only one who can be listed as "Dan Jacoby." Giving "priority" to IDs just because they are used more often is fraught with all kinds of dangers.
May I recommend that you formally register and let the site managers know who you are? It worked for me.
Full disclosure: I am not a site manager.
It's certainly not intentional.
Submitted by Bouldin on 25 March 2007 - 12:43pm.
Thanks for reading and for your comment. The thing to realize, though, is that manual approval means just that. The process works as follows: on most days, I check the approval queue two or three times, more if there's a spike in traffic. There's no set schedule for that, so if I'm, say, swamped with work or traveling, there are greater delays. I'm not sure that a set schedule would work from a technical perspective, because that would likely require automation, which in turn defeats the purpose of having a live human being read things before posting.
I have to say that my personal preference really would be to not have to moderate comments at all, because that does take away from the immediacy of the medium, but on the other hand, as the experiences on many blogs show, that would result in spam and in some pretty offensive stuff being posted.
It really is an imperfect situation, because many people don't want to or can't create accounts, say, if they work in politics. We're aware of that, and we do honestly try the best we can.
Good policy, but..
As one who enjoys reading the Daily Gotham and occasionaly submits comments, I think the criteria that you laid out is reasonable. My only concern involves the time it takes to clear comments from those of us who do not have an account. Several weeks ago, I submitted a comment disagreeing with a post in (I believe) an unoffensive way. It took approximately 24 hours for the comment to be cleared and printed. By that time, the post was already on your page two and was probably not being read by anyone. Thus, any impact that my comment may have had in generating a more extensive discussion was lost.
Thus, in managing your otherwise sound policy, I hope you would impose some sort of time limit - say no more than two hours - upon either printing or zapping comments. If this aproach works, it might also provide a useful precedent that the people at Room 8 might also wish to consider.
You might also consider making a distinction between persons, like myself, who post under consistently used pseudonyms and those who simply post anonomously. But this should not be a big concern if you adhere to a "print or zap" time limit.