A discussion on HW occasionally turning off comments on stories

[John Bonnes]

I'm starting this thread in case people want to express concerns or counter ideas to HW occasionally turning off comments. This thread is about the policy of having no comment stories, and how to best handle them, or how to best handle stories that might be controversial enough to overload our moderators. 

But I can't emphasize the following enough: this is not the place to express comments related to those stories. Those comments will be hidden and suspensions will be levied to members who ignore that. This is a discussion about the policy, not the stories themselves. 

Here was the topic where I talked about how we'll handle these: 

 

[John Bonnes]

I'll also just copy and past that topic so people don't need to click over:  

I'll give a quick introduction, explain what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, what we will probably do in the future, and give you a chance to react to the course of action.

1. I'm one of the leaders of Zone Coverage, and this new Hockey Wilderness site is something I helped start, basing it off of another MN sports site, Twins Daily. We also have forums, and we've had to deal with similar sticky issues. That's why I'm budding in. Here's my plan of action:

2. I'm going to lock this thread and I'm going to hide all comments that were unrelated to the topic that the topic was about. The reason is simple: it's way off-topic. If someone ever tries to hijack a thread, moderators should usually try to redirect it back to the topic at hand with those methods.

3. In the future, if we have stories that we expect to get an emotional reaction, before we lock the comments, you'll see an explanation like this: "Due to the level of effort required to moderate this topic, we're turning off comments. Furthermore, if any topics are created or hijacked for that purpose, they'll be quick to hide them and issue suspensions. We hope you understand. Experience has shown that Hockey Wilderness' administration and moderators are part-time and can't dedicate the amount of attention it would need to keep the conversation civil." 

If you want to talk about that, we understand, but there are plenty of other forums where you can do so. I can't emphasize this enough: we just don't have the manpower to moderate discussions like this.

4. I'm going to start a thread to talk about this course of action because, again, I don't want to hijack this thread, and the temptation to do so here is just too strong. So if you would like to talk about how we're handling this, you can do so here:

Thank you, everyone, for your understanding as this community and its moderators navigate our way through a topic like this for the first time.