Why LV Review-Journal brought comments back

"Internet comment boards are often nasty, vitriolic places, and ours are no exception."

So begins a Medium post by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which earlier this year took the controversial step of removing comments from its website altogether, albeit temporarily.

"We were getting tens of thousands of comments daily," Graydon Johns, online director for the Journal, told Journalism.co.uk.

"However, there was a concerted effort by a group of people to stifle the voices of other people using the tools and privileges that we had given them through our comment board system."

The group began targeting comments that held opinions different to their own, and "down-voting" them by flagging them as offensive or spammy.

We pay a lot of attention to our comment boards because we care about what our audience is sayingGraydon Johns, Las Vegas Review-Journal

"A lot of it would be political," Johns explained. "You take anything that has to do with local and national politics, gun rights, immigration, anything where there are really strong opposite opinions on those kinds of issues, that's where we saw a lot of it."

The Journal is of course just one of many news outlets who have wrestled with the best way to make 'below the line' a space for fair, open and insightful dialogue.

Reuters announced it was shutting down comments altogether at the end of last year, while Huffington Post and Trinity Mirror both scrapped anonymous comments in 2013.

The Journal uses the Disqus commenting system, where any flagged comments disappear from the site after a certain number of votes and enter a moderation queue or, as Johns called it, "purgatory".

With no dedicated community team at the Journal, comment moderation was managed by the outlet's wider digital department.

The number of other responsibilities staff were juggling meant it could take a while for the moderation queue to be checked – and some commenters started to catch onto that.

What's more, the group of rogue commenters began flagging not just the comments they disagreed with, but also any posts by the same members of the community on completely unrelated stories.

As the situation worsened, the Journal took all the usual steps for tackling troublesome comments, such as blacklisting certain accounts and blocking IP addresses, but Johns said the commenters "found ways around that".


Screenshot from the Las Vegas Review-Journal

Eventually, Johns decided enough was enough and the comment boards were shut down on January 22.

The move was intended to let users know "we're watching, we're paying attention and we don't appreciate what's happening on the comment boards," said Johns.

"Because I think a lot of times, the way comment boards are handled on media company sites is we put them there, and we ignore them.

"We don't do that. We pay a lot of attention to our comment boards because we care about what our audience is saying.

The "cooling-off period" also presented an opportunity for the Journal to review its commenting strategy.

Previously, users were able to register to comment on Disqus without a verified email address, a setting that has since been reversed.

Having that human touch is what we see as the most valuableGraydon Johns, Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Journal also trained staff in its wider newsroom to enable them to assist with comment moderation, meaning less of a strain on the digital team and a more regularly checked moderation queue.

Any effect on site traffic was "pretty minimal," said Johns.

The site, which covers southern Nevada but also has a large audience outside the state, gets between 2.5 to 3 million unique users a month.

But with commenting removed from the site there was, of course, nothing to stop users turning to Twitter and other social platforms.

"Obviously we had people on both sides of the fence," said Johns. "We had the people who were like, 'I can't believe you would do this, this is where I go to have a conversation with people'".

"And then we had others saying, 'It's about time, thank you. We totally understand why you're doing this'."

@reviewjournal I agree with you. The hatred/disrespect in the comments are out of control, not just in the RJ, but all my favorite sites

— Kris (@KrisKrispool) January 23, 2015

A quick search on Twitter for that time-frame reveals mixed options, as well as some pretty angry tweets.

However, Johns said it was always part of the plan to bring comments back, which the Journal did just two weeks later.

So now, four months on, has the quality of commenting improved?

Yes and no, said Johns.

"Those same people are still there, and they're still trying to stifle the voices of other people," he explained.

"But because we have people paying attention much more regularly we're able to prevent that from happening."

The changes implemented during the commenting hiatus also mean the outlet is now able to make sure "the good comments, the ones that are the most valuable, are being showcased the best".

And despite a few teething problems with sign-ups in the first couple of weeks, Johns said the volume of comments the site receives is now "about the same" as before.

"But in the end, having moderation, having that human touch is what we see as the most valuable," he added.

"That's what has had the greatest effect on the quality of our comment boards."

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