The inestimable Tim Dunlop and I were having coffee together a few months back and discussing internet trolls, the dangers of comments and how to run a successful website.

He has years of experience in dealing with trolls, and in running successful blogs where the comments section turns into a community and a forum for lively debate. His advice to me was that we should get rid of comments on the articles and just have a letters page to give a voice to people who feel particularly strongly about any given issue.

I liked the idea but didn’t quite have the courage (or the time) to follow through. Websites are supposed to have comments, aren’t they? Isn’t it arrogant and slightly smug to disallow any other opinions on an opinion piece?

Then Dave Gaukroger sent me this which perfectly articulated most of Tim’s arguments against a comments function.

I threw the idea of removing comments function from our site out into the Twitterverse and, apart from a few haters, most people agreed that comments rarely add value and take up too much time that is better devoted to other things. Some valuable points made were that when we don’t (yet) have the time to be posting every day the community forum thing doesn’t really work. If people have something to say about something we’ve published they have plenty of space of their own to craft a reply. Also, because we publish an array of writers, discussion with the authors can’t really take hold. Most of our writers have full time jobs and blogs of their own, they don’t have the time to be monitoring comments on our site.

Then the following comment appeared on this article:

"Thought I'd take a peek to see if I wanted to suscribe to your mag, well, fuck you and your filthy misandrist bullshit statistics about domestic violence from one of your cunt sniffing, women's studies course, men-hating lecturers.

Ask yourself this question, if 15% of women are the victims of violent abuse, how many people do you know, and how many are wife bashers or bashed wives. Do the math before you start up with your fucked up sexist bullshit. You make me want to vomit. By the way, the real figure is 2.8%, and it's about the same for women against men violence and well. I hope your vile biased rag goes down the toilet where it belongs."

It was there for about 12 hours before I had a chance to check what had come in. That was pretty much the decider. (If anyone is wondering why I’ve republished it after turning the comments of because of it, I think it’s worth publishing as an demonstration of what real misogyny looks like and the sort of hatred people feel free to spew under the protection of anonymity. Doesn’t mean I am willing to have any more of it.)

However, much of what we publish is opinion and giving people a right of reply, if there is something they feel strongly enough about to write and send us, is fair enough.

So, we have turned off the comments on all our posts. Instead, if you have something you really want to say in response to something we’ve published, you can do it on our letters page, send us an This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or even a luddite paper letter (PO Box 185 St Kilda, 3182). If it’s not abusive or trollish we’ll put it up on the letters page for you.

If we actually get anything and if it’s really good we’ll probably even publish it in the next magazine.

But I suspect that without the instant and anonymous comments features we’re not going to hear from terribly many people now. Are we?

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