I’ve noticed a lot of confusion and frustration concerning the CT’s moderation, burial, and deletion system, so here’s a brief primer on the current setup:
First, our public editor, Justin Graves, does not delete comments; they are merely buried and marked as such. We did have a bug that got some comments accidentally deleted, but our web editor Jamie Chung has since fixed this bug. If a comment has disappeared recently, this was due to the bug and not intentional.
Second, a new IP address banning system is now in place. It works like this: If the same commenter from a single IP address has five or more of his/her comments buried due to a violation of the CT guidelines, then that address will be banned from commenting for one (1) month. Jamie is toying with raising the requirement to ten buried comments before banning an address, but currently it stands at five.
EDIT: To comment, one is asked for a name (it can be anything or blank/anonymous), and an email address that is not shared. As of Feb. 24, the blogs have been changed so that the same applies on blog comments.
Additionally, we have recently noticed a couple of possible new bugs, including the “flag” feature sometimes not responding without reloading the page first, and, more mysteriously, some comments have been apparently independently moving and hierarchically reorganizing themselves every once in a while . Jamie’s looking into it.
That’s about it. I hope that helps clear up some of the concerns I’ve seen around the CT website. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Pk