Comments Closed at Althouse

This happened over the weekend.

Ann writes:

There were some great commenters over the years, some of whom were driven away by vicious commenters. I emphasized free speech until I was forced to retrench and make good faith the test. But that was a deletion policy. I (and Meade) can't spend all our time monitoring comments and deleting. Some truly ugly people stooped to active harassment. This is my place, after all, and I can't host an endless party where there are guests who continually abuse my hospitality. I had to close the door.

She'll reopen the comments. Althouse isn't a blog that can survive without them. But she's been getting too many trolls and it's been taking too much time to deal with them. There's some background that I haven't completely mastered yet, but the sense is that a lot of Instapundit readers are coming over to Althouse and f-king sh*t up.

Here's a post with a long comment thread that relates, "'A somewhat dismissive response'." And Ann's response, "Instapundit says that what he thinks about what he calls my "advice" is "immaterial" but that it's 'probably pretty good advice'..."

That latter post features nearly 300 comments and is time-stamped at 9:26am on the 7th.

Then, checking the search function for "comments," Ann posts a poll on comments at 6:17pm that evening; a flashback to opening comments at the blog in 2005 at 7:07pm; and an invitation to comment by email to Meade at 7:53pm.

Ann's also ruminating and commiserating publicly in updates.

Reading through some of the comments at the various posts, I saw mention of using comment moderation, but Ann indicates that the Blogger "moderate comments" function is not working for her blog. I switched to Disqus some time ago, so I can't comment on how well comment moderation is working on Blogger. I emailed Ann with some information about Disqus commenting, which works well for a lot of Blogger bloggers, especially the useful service of importing old Blogger comments into the Disqus system. It worked for me, although I don't know with Ann's huge archive of comments that it's worth the risk. Ann loves that archive as a history of a community, and once you switch over to Disqus you might have a hard time switching back to Blogger commenting. I don't know, since I haven't felt like switching back, but it's a dilemma.

But something else occurred to me: Clicking on the "post a comment" link at the blog reveals that "Comments on this blog are restricted to team members." I've never used that function, but basically any commenter at the blog has to be a pre-approved team member of the Althouse community. It's not much different that comment registration at a Wordpress blog, and that raises the possibility for Ann and Meade just to create and solicit a pre-approved Althouse blog commenting community. I hesitate to use the example, but folks may remember that Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs was one of the top counter-jihad blogs, and putatively conservative. Charles is positively obsessed with controlling his comments. He pre-approved comments though a sort of random lottery where he'd open the commenting system to new registrants for a short time at unannounced intervals. He'd often get dozens --- if not hundreds --- of new commenters who registered, which he called "hatchlings." It was kind of a big deal back in the day, because folks really wanted to be part of the LGF community. Charles would close the registration window and announce how many new members joined. People would constantly be checking the blog, at the least, to see if they could catch the window opening for new commenters. I never did register, because I didn't care about it that much, and besides, when LGF started posting all the aggressive Darwinism/anti-Christian hatred ... well, the idea of joining the community decidedly lost its appeal. And as for LGF today ... no doubt readers are aware of that tragedy.

But still, it's an interesting example. Say Althouse were to open her comments to new registrants periodically, say on the weekend mornings. This could be done by email requests sent to Ann or Meade by interested readers. They'd have to have a Blogger ID and then could be approved to comment at the blog. If at any time those commenters became abusive they could be banned at a moment's notice.

She's going to need to do something like this. A large plurality responding to her poll said that the blog was basically all about the comments. I actually read Althouse more for the content than the comments, but certainly the comments are a major draw for any reader. I'll never forget the Jessica Valenti "breasts" controversy, at which time I found myself reading comments for hours. That was seven years ago. The blogosphere wouldn't be the same without those periodic Althouse blasts of observation that upend sensibilities and rejigger thinking on some important issue or another. And of course, Ann married one of her commenters --- so c'mon, you're going to tell me that a blog that was featured at the New York Times, in a report on the blogress and her suitor, is going to now be without comments, the very feature that has defined what it is to be an Althouse reader? No way.

In any case, I personally expect commenting to open back over there not too long from now, for the reasons that I've outlined above. Ann and Meade need to find the right way to manage it, because the hatred and vitriol online is extremely "mellow-harshing," as I've written about here many times. But bloggers have their own systems. Some don't allow comments and work more as portals to the Internet. Some bloggers are vanity whores where having comments would be impossible since they'd expose the naked emperor. The opposite of that is Ann's blog, which the New York Times situated as a metaphor for a royal court. That's a pretty good one, as Ann's certainly a benign blog monarch who tolerates much in the realm. But of late the commoners have become so rancid as to completely discombobulate the kingdom (or princess-ipality, be that as it may).

In any case, I'll be checking over at Althouse to see how things go. It's going to work out.

UPDATED: Ann writes to say that opening the comments to "team members" would open the front page to everybody, which is a no-can-do situation. Well, I tried.