Who Owns Your Comments?
It’s an ongoing conversation within the IntenseDebate community: who owns your comments, blog publishers or commenters? Before we continue, we’d like to acknowledge Hank Williams’ post and Daniel Ha’s post addressing this issue. As this topic extends beyond IntenseDebate, we’ve reached out to the team at Disqus to work on creating a common groundwork for comment ownership across platforms.
Who do you think should own your comments?
Currently the debate is taking place on several IntenseDebate fronts (Get Satisfaction, blogs, emails) and it’s getting time to start making some decisions. Everything we do at IntenseDebate has you in mind, including this decision. We need your input. Of course, we realize that we’re not going to come to a unanimous decision here – “you can’t please all the people all the time” – but the goal is to get close and find a comfortable solution. So let us know your thoughts.
To get the ball rolling we want to propose three options:
1.) Blog Publisher Ownership – Comments made on a blog belong to the blog owner, giving them the ability to edit the comments as they see fit (deleting and editing comments). Blog owners have had this ability with WordPress and other platforms. The only change is that comments are now tied to the commenter in IntenseDebate (which is why there is even a debate here).
2.) Commenter Ownership – Comments cannot be edited by blog publishers. Comments can still be deleted by blog publishers – blog owners must be able to remove spam and inflammatory comments. Commenters can still access their full comment history in their IntenseDebate profiles. Commenters can take their comments with them into platforms other than the blog commented on.
3.) Shared Ownership – This is where it gets complicated and we try to reach a compromise. We’re proposing that blog publishers should have the ability to edit and delete comments as long as the original comment is accessible both on the edited comment and in the commenter’s comment history. If the blog owner edits the comment, then the commenter will receive a notification and have the ability to delete the comment. The commenter will be able to access their full comment history.
We’re sure there are specific stipulations that we’re leaving out that should be included, but we’re trying to keep this post to a reasonable length. Ideally we’d like your opinion on which option you find the most appealing. Then we can start hashing out the specifics. Please vote in the poll below and of course, comment away!
Posted by Michael Koenig in News
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