On the previous post, a few contributors dropped the following comments. I thought I’d get a new post started to handle the topic. Here are excerpts of some of the comments:

Multitudes of comments and opinions are being deleted..within minutes of the posting for no apparent reason. I have sent an email to pluck..copying your managing editor(didn’t know just who I should contact about this ridiculous situation). Do you think someone at the Gazette could look into this situation? thanks

. . . [T]here was a flood of deletions over the weekend of opinions and posts that were not even in any way offensive or inflammatory.
It almost appears as though someone went through and deleted nearly every post of certain individuals and practically anyone who was communicating with them. This is most certainly overkill.
If you could check into this on our behalf or forward our inquiry to the appropriate party, we would be very thankful.

. . . We are having a consistent problem in the Forum section as well as in the story section with several comments being removed for no reason— but then a few weeks ago when someone posted blatant profanity it took some time to get it removed (and the user, although posting very pornographically in the middle of the day, still has an account!)

It seems that some users have multiple accounts- as they post a comment on a story and suddenly have 4 or 5 recommendations. I suspect that they are doing this as well as flagging things over and over again.

Now I see that a lot of legitimate posts were removed for almost no reason. This is getting out of control. For the most part, you have many wonderful users who enjoy a spirited debate and do so respectfully- but there are a few who are incapable of posting anything without including personal insults and they should be dealt with. One user in particular has had 2 accounts suspended and now is on with multiple accounts causing constant problems. This person now claims to have made a friend at Plunk and it seems like that may be the case as many people who have disagreed (respectfully, I may add) seem to be having their posts targeted and removed.

We use a program called SiteLife to provide the ability for visitors to leave comments, post photos, create blogs, and participate in forums. SiteLife is made by a company called Pluck.

Part of the SiteLife program is the “report abuse” function that appears underneath any kind of material contributed by a registered user. If the “report abuse” link is clicked by anybody, the associated content — whether it’s a comment, a photo, a blog post, whatever — is copied and placed in a central administration area where all abuse reports can be reviewed in one place. Gazette editors can review all the comments, etc., that have been flagged by the “report abuse” link, and decide whether the comments indeed should be removed or whether they should stay.

We do not spend our entire days in that admin tool, waiting to adjudicate every click of the “report abuse” link. We’re busy trying to cover the news and get the newspaper out.

For that reason, we also give you and your fellow gazette.com visitors a self-policing tool that can be used until the sheriff arrives. A comment will be temporarily removed from the visible discussion thread if five different registered users independently click the “report abuse” link on the same item. That way, if visitors spot a flagrantly inappropriate comment while editors are busy doing other things, they have the ability to temporarily remove it, and not have to wait for a Gazette editor to come across it.

Comments that receive five independent “report abuse” clicks are placed in the same SiteLife admin tool for review. After we review it, we can restore the comment if we think it does not violate our terms of use, or we can delete it for good if we agree that it was right to flag the comment as inappropriate.

If comments are literally disappearing within moments of being posted, one of three things is happening:

1. SiteLife is malfunctioning
2. Five independent people are working together, pouncing immediately on particular comments
3. A Gazette editor happens to be reading the post at that moment and has decided it should be deleted.

For the record, I don’t think No. 3 has ever happened.

If you think your comments are disappearing for no good reason, send me the details — story name, date, time, etc. — and we can see if it’s a simple malfunction.

Whenever someone clicks the “report abuse” link, their user name also is attached to that report. So, we can see whether there are gangs of registered users banding together to wage deletion campaigns. I’ve never found evidence in the admin tool that any group of users is ganging up on anyone else. But we’ll stay on the lookout.

As Gazette editors, we tend to give contributors the most latitude possible within the bounds of our terms of use. Almost any comment is fair game, as long as it is on topic, suitable for family viewing, and is devoid of personal attack. As a business, it’s not in our interest to restrict comments. More comments = more pageviews, which is what we want.

No one at Pluck has the ability to change or remove any comments at gazette.com.

I agree that in general, people are too quick to click on the “report abuse” link. Most often, what is flagged as abuse is nothing more than an opinion. It’s not abuse, under my interpretation of our policy anyway, to say “that’s a stupid idea.” It is abuse to say “Your’e stupid.”