Geez, dad.

Works for me. At least as long as you are serious about banning people.

Nice. They're rules written by somebody who didn't want to write rules and those tend to be the best rules.

Under Rule #3: Can you exempt Greg Sargent so both sides can continue to taunt him mercilessly when he doesn't "report" our preferred biases?

Regrets,G.,

I am heading to Hillary's Indiana bar and have a beer and a shot (or several) with the guys there and toast Obama.

Cheers.

You might want to look at this:

http://www.cspan.org/community/etiquette.asp

It covers a few things you don't, but which you may want to consider.

I like that it's concise and friendly, though.

Most of the serious junk will end with the Primary season. Though with a report/complain button your going to need someone full time to sort out the details.

Just imagining something like the Simpsons episode when they were going in for family counciling and given the ability shock each other. LOL.....There will be a lot of button hitting in this group.......

Thanks, Josh. Personally, I try to ignore or avoid those who don't have the self-confidence to post any personal information in their Profile. There have been some commentators whom I've thought are assholes, then I see from their Profile that they are real people with real lives and actual things that they care about, so I take their heated rhetoric with a bit more understanding. Anonymous speech is almost always corrosive to intelligent conversation. I'm Terry Carroll, and I recommend against anonymity. (However, my kitten avatar would rather avoid conflict altogether.)

Is there a need for this? I look upon this blog, like others, as a search for the truth. A lot of things are written, but in the end (we hope) our goal the truth shines through. Along this road to the truth there are some verbal potholes, but who cares. Sticks and stones. On a given day perhaps I am an SOB. Usually when someone goes for the gutter with me I know it's because there's no factual argument available, so I win.

A blog will never be like a coffee house conversation, nor should it be. The mere fact that posters use fictitious names is one indicator. In any case, we're rather anonymous and that helps us lead straight to the truth. That's good -- let the games begin, no verbal holds barred, may the best argument win. These are tough times and they call for tough people with rigorous facts and thoughtful arguments. I'll take my coffee straight, thank you very much.

There will always be one or two that go too far. It'll be obvious. A public reprimand and warning should suffice, if not, banishment.

The report/alert button is not going to work, IMO. You're going to need a full-time person to sort through the noise in order to remove posts that are truly hate speech/libelous.

If you do decide to implement such a system, I suggest creating a database where you track the "reports" that are generated on each user. If the user crosses a certain threshold of reports, then, you investigate whether his or her posts are actually problematic or if the user is somehow being sabotaged by someone who does not like his or her opinions.

Any way you slice it, the option to report abuse of the commenting policy is extremely complicated. Additionally, you have to think about the people who are going to abuse the option of reporting comments as being in violation. There should be consequences for users who repeatedly report comments for silly reasons, like mere disagreement.

But, the general idea, I like. I think the place is fine without such guidelines, but the ones you have suggested seem fair and not too oppressive. Cheers!

The rules are of course, great. Enforcement a little tougher. There will be definite abuse of any "Report Abuse" feature, so to avoid having to dig through every single instance of a comment reporting, perhaps it could be set up so that it requires two or more flags? That might cut down on the amount of comments being reported out of sheer disagreement or any other non-legit reason.

Curious though - will these apply to the blogs as well as the comment section? Will there be an option to report blogs as offensive?

And can we still rail against Lieberman? ;)

These sorts of dictatorial powers undermine the peoples right to free speech. There are easily agreed upon almost universal guildlines that can and do prohibit offensive or scatological language, threats on any kind, or obviously scurrilous slander. However if for example referring to inviduals in the Bush government as fascists is considered by the TPM politburo unacceptable commentary, - then TPM would be restraining, restricting, and silencing the peoples right to free speech, the definition of fascism, and a dissenting or counter opinion to the parrots who frame the Bush government as bold and decisive leadership, who talks to god in the WH.

Broadly curbing commentary will diminish the voices of dissent, opposition, or those voices who question, challenge, or reject the stated point or opinion on TPM. I'll wait to see your rules, and how they are employed, - but the idea of stifling debate in anyway is anathema to the spirit of democracy and the only real strength and value of the "blogsphere" - the unadulterated freedom of speech.

The real strength of the "blogsphere", and democracy for that matter is rooted in freedom of speech. I wait to see your rules, and how they are employed, but the idea of restricting, restraining, prohibiting, or silencing any commentary is anathema to the spirit of democracy and what thought would be TPM charter.

Any diminishment of speech effectiviely silences voices that oppose, dissent, with, challenge, question, or reject the state points, or opinions. These debates should rightfully be won through civil discourse, and certain rules prohibiting offensive language, or threats of any kind, or scurrilous slander can and should be minimized. That said is referring to the Bush government as "fascist" (a description I will defend in any forum as accurate and correct)something the TPM politburo would deem unacceptable? Dictatorial rules defend dictatorial messages, and dictatorial "message-force multipliers".

The people have the right to the "freedom of speech", and to "...petition the government for redress of grievances." Voices must have a platform and the right to counter the parrots in the socalled MSM bruting for example the fictions that Bush is a man of business accumen and a bold and decisive leader who speeks to god in the WH, or that America is NOT in a recession, or that we ARE making progress in Iraq.

Please forgive the multiple posts and remove all duplicates. I have been attempting to deliver this post for 40 minutes and was never given any signal that any of these posts landed. Instead, this is the response that appeared on my window after each attempt. (

SERVER ERROR) "...Please contact the server administrator, domains@stinson.com.au and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at comment.talkingpointsmemo.com Port 80"

Later I attempted to shorten the posts in an attempt to deliver a comment and be herd.

Again my apologies for the multiple posts. I intended to deliver only a single comment.

Great. Thanks for taking the time to try and improve the experience here.

True, you can't catch everyone who doesn't follow the guidelines, but patterns will emerge and make it easier to predict.

Deanie's post made the list. There is a non-intuitive feel to the list, since even a large-number recommended post has to wait for a turn. The clock overrules the relative recommendation values, as far as I can tell. And so instead of shooting up and displacing other posts with modest tallies, it may not show until after people have left their computers, gone to bed, etc.

This is GREAT NEWS!!1!! for HILLARY!!1!1!!

Seriously, this all seems sane, rational, and well-reasoned. I'm all for it.

How about a Bloggers' Wall of Fame category in next year's Golden Dukes? I'd love to see the Gene Shalit clone, who kept me on the floor with his intensely creative, well-crafted, neo-Jungian analyses of others' work, at the top of that list.

I like it. Makes me think of what was on the matchbook cover of the tav where I met my wife.

"Dedicated to Quality Draft, Fine Food, Pleasant Music, and Stimulating Company. We're also dedicated to extremes of opinion, hoping that a livable marriage will result. If physical violence is your nature, either develop your verbal abilities or leave."

Josh - Many thanks for grabbing this bowl of jello. I think TPM commentary needs a little more discipline. Who knows, if the place is a bit more civil (especially I/P issues) I might start posting again.

I think the major focus for TPM is, of course, to achieve the highest readership possible. This in turn improves the posting community with a much more diverse collection of opinions. As on most blogs, a few overly vocal posters will dominate a thread and pull it down with insults and/or inappropriate comments. I have abandoned several sites because of this. Believe it or not, the History Channel was one of the worse. I'm in no way interested in spending my spare time reading childish insults thrown back and forth between anonymous readers. But I do crave intense and intelligent debate about our country's problems.

I'm here because the information made available is some of the most pertinent and up-to-date you can find anywhere. And the analysis is always honest and straightforward. The comments are likewise intelligent and spirited. But when the insults unnecessarily start creeping in, it really puts a drag on the whole experience and gets in the way of real constructive dialog.

I applaud the move and think with just a minimum of enforcement this site would easily be heads above the rest.

Now that everyone else is sleeping soundly, let me just say, "Thanks, Josh, for inviting us into the discussion on how to set the rules. That's the democratic instinct we expect from TPM."
The growing-pain glitches we're all so irate about are a small price to pay for the open-ended forum TPM is morphing into.
Still more intimate, tactile and welcoming than the cool, monolithic Slate, TPM is treading the fine line between being a community and being all-inclusive. Nobody has pulled it off yet, but I believe you stand the best shot.
The issue I raised earlier about Recommended Posts is typical of those you face. You want the cream to come to the top. Rigid, by-the-clock software can get in the way of that.
Slate's approach was to subjectively award the coveted designation Star Poster, and offer selections of posts under Editor's Picks.
Very labor-intensive. You don't want to have to do that yourself, and you don't want crude algorithms to do it for you.
You want software that is as organic as the process you're trying to moderate and encourage --software that may not yet exist.
But TPM is creating the demand, so it won't be long. If a website can bring down an attorney-general (don't be modest!), it can certainly push major IT advances.
Like I said above, go for it.

I welcome any and all rules in sites I visit, even if they don't end up working as intended. At least I know the site is trying to provide some sorting of quality from dross for the reader, and that interests me enough to keep checking it.

The internet allows anyone to have their own blog, so raising "freedom of speech" on this question is bogus. Some like to scream that rules and filtering features are censorship. I call them editing.

Unedited and unfiltered sites are available in mass quantities on the internet and most people with jobs or lives are increasingly rejecting them. For me, it's not really the issue of civility so much as it's such a waste of time to wade through tons of ugly dross and sturm and drang role playing for god knows what reason (participants can't afford real-life group therapy? hate their father or that bully in grade school, have to make that anonymous fellow on the internet into an image of him in order to knock him down...) letting quality go unread.

How about acceptable avatars? There are currently several that don't quite match my concept of civility. Worse than the avatars, themselves, is the message they seem to convey from the commenter: "I am a detestable human being. In your face. Live with it."

You can use a similar rule of thumb: "If you wouldn't bring along the three month old, decomposing corpse of your father or your demoniacal, chronically vomiting little sister to a real-life political discussion at a Coffee House, don't do it here either."

I would take out the "please go somewhere else," and change "four-letter word" to explicit language.

So if I posted a Chris Rock dialogue --stuff I wouldn't say in conversation--how would you separate racial and offensive words from political commentary?