The comment section at the end of stories is one of the baseline innovations of the internet media era, enabling once-passive readers to make their voices heard. Established media organisations initially viewed comments, pioneered in the world of blogs, as a dangerous development that threatened to pollute their sites with unworthy writings and possibly expose them to legal liability.

Those initial qualms have been overcome, and most media sites now welcome comments (though some, including this one, still review comments before they appear on the site). But the worries about how to handle comments, though focused on the wrong issues, were not entirely misplaced.

The legal issues, happily, have been the least of the problems. In the US, at least, legislation and case law has for the most part protected publishers from liability for reader comments. If someone libels you in a comment thread, or violates your copyrights, you generally have to go after that individual, rather than the website owner.

Obscene and scurrilous comments have also been less of an issue than one might expect, at least in our experience at NewWest.Net. We don't review comments prior to publication, but if someone engages in obscenity, or personal attacks, or racist or otherwise patently offensive comments, that's a violation of our terms of service, and we simply delete the comments in question and contact the person involved. If it continues, we ban that person from commenting on the site.

The tricky part actually involves comments that are not illegal, or obscene, or otherwise in obvious violation of the terms of service. What do you do with a commenter who is simply obnoxiously argumentative, to the point where people don't want to enter the conversation because they don't want to subject themselves to a rhetorical bludgeoning by someone who is articulate and informed, but perhaps has too much time on his hands?

What do you do with a commenter who always wants to shift the discussion to a particular hot-button issue, which might have little or nothing to do with the story at hand?

How do you handle a situation where someone is being compensated for promoting a product or service or political point of view in a comment thread? How do you even distinguish between someone who is a paid shill, and someone who believes strongly in something and also happens to have a job that involves advocating that belief?

And how do you make a comment thread interesting for readers, when you might have 30 or 40 or 50 comments of nit-picking back-and-forth over some side issue, and then comment 51 is a genuinely thoughtful and interesting addition to the story? The vast majority even of comment readers, you can bet, won't get down that far in the thread.

There are technology tools to address some of these things. Comment rating systems, for example, can help move the best comments up to the top.

But for most of these issues there are no technical fixes. Furthermore, the notion that the online community around a given site will police the thread itself – the theoretical solution to all of these problems – is more of an ideology than a practical solution. Most people don't want to be cops, they just want a safe place for information-sharing and civil conversation.

One way or another, it takes deliberate human intervention – i.e. somebody whose job it is to monitor and moderate comments – to keep the conversations relevant and civilised. That's not very Web 2.0, but it's reality.

One of the basic conundrums of comment-management is that any efforts to regulate and control comment threads will also have the effect of depressing participation. If you preview comments in advance, or require site registration or membership for comments, or limit the length of comments, you'll get a lot fewer of them. That can be OK, but it also undermines the principle of the open forum, and in most cases the more active the conversation the more interesting it is for everyone.

We're genuinely puzzled over how to handle some of these things. If you have any suggestions, well, leave them in the comments below.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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