Changing our comment moderation policy on MaltaToday.com.mt

MaltaToday.com.mt has changed its comment moderation policy in anticipation of heightened activity on our comments board.

With the possibility of an early election and the political buzz generated by the recent cabinet reshuffle, we feel that we should temporarily suspend our light-touch moderation policy, to one that employs more careful scrutiny of the comments posted on our stories.

Before explaining any further, a big thank you to our readers: MaltaToday.com.mt moved up further in the Alexa rankings from 15^th to 11^th place within just 30 days, consolidating our position as Malta's second-most accessed website with an average 1.1 million page views every day over the last two weeks. In fact in the first half of January the site served over 17 million pages to 486,597 visitors. Thanks again to our readers for choosing us as their trusted news source.

So what's with the new policy?

We feel that the current debate on Malta's political stability and the possibility of early elections merits a more direct control of what gets posted on our comment-boards.

Readers (and not the incorrect term 'bloggers' which is an altogether different type of internet creature) have enjoyed the faculty of posting their comments in real-time. Our light-touch moderation allowed readers to regulate each other by alerting us to possible offensive comments, which were then put to the test of our user guidelines [READ THEM HERE].

We felt our light-touch moderation was the best way of encouraging online debate, as well as allowing a respected tradition on the internet to allow readers to post comments using nicknames rather than their real names.

We are keeping our report abuse function, which sends flagged messages to our editors to review.

Under our new policy, we will be reviewing all comments as fast as possible, but please be patient. We have been engulfed by a wave of comments, and we are trying to moderate the discussion.

We will be especially publishing comments which contribute to the debate - so take this opportunity to put forward posts that add colour to the debate, but keep it civil: we are adopting a zero-tolerance on offensive posts, trolling, and misrepresentation of stories, the people mentioned in the reports, or Mediatoday and its employees.

So remember to be relevant, be aware that what you write may be misunderstood, and to think before you post. The things you say may offend and hurt other people, or be irrelevant to the debate.