Your 8.5.20 Playpen

Regrettably, I’ve come to the point where I feel I have no choice but to make some changes to commenting here at the blog.

It’s regrettable because I’ve been a firm believer since the day I started GTP that a free-wheeling comments section makes for a better experience for the readership here.  The last six months of watching how some of you have reacted to the pandemic has changed my mind about that.  I’ve tried in as many ways as I can to channel discussion so that the comment threads aren’t overwhelmed with irrelevant debate, name calling and other forms of personal disagreement, but nothing has worked, to my disappointment.

In the past few days, it’s culminated in a feeling that I’ve never experienced before:  the blog has become something a drudge for me.  Not writing about college football and related matters — that stuff is still fun — but spending greater amounts of time and energy babysitting the comments section.  And I’ll be the first to admit I’m not doing a very good job with that right now.

My last try at getting a handle on things has turned out to be a complete flop.  Some of you don’t understand how it works.  Some of you have simply continued to plow right through my requests to respect the commenting space.  And the time I spend monitoring your behavior has actually increased, and rather significantly at that.

It’s gotten to the point where I’m devoting so much attention here that it’s bleeding into time I should be spending on my day job and my family.  That ain’t right and I can’t continue to do that.  So, I’m making two changes, with the hope that I won’t have to make any more, but with the understanding that I still have a couple of options left to use if I need to.

Effective immediately, I’m ditching the timeout.  The two folks who are in there now are being moved out.  (That doesn’t apply to anyone who has been banned.  They’re still gone.)  Instead, I’m going to take a different step when I find that a comment thread has gone off the rails:  I’ll shut down the comment thread in its entirety.  That’s much easier for me to monitor and it achieves the same end result.  Further, if I find a person is repeatedly responsible for thread closings, I’ll boot them from commenting altogether.

By the way, I’m not going to waste your time or mine elucidating the rules again.  Gawd knows I’ve spent plenty of bandwidth doing that already.  You know where the lines are drawn.  You also know the Playpen exists for whatever off-topic musings you want to dive into.  Either respect the blog protocols, or find someplace else to comment.

The second change will come Saturday, so that I have the weekend to make sure it works.  Starting then, you will have to register to comment at Get The Picture.  You can still use your moniker as opposed to your real name, if you so choose, but you will have to provide me with a working, real world, email address in order to register.  I don’t wish to clog the comments section with warnings about behavior anymore, and that means I must have a valid way to reach you with a message.

There won’t be any further limitations on your access to commenting than that, but I will tell you that registration gives me the ability to condition your comments appearing upon administrative approval.  I don’t want to do that for several reasons, but I won’t pretend it’s not a future option if circumstances warrant it.

I’m not going to apologize to you for this.  It’s been a long time coming, and, quite frankly, it’s something of a relief for me.  I can also say the number of emails I’ve received over the past two months asking for something to be done about out of control commenters has been the highest I’ve ever received in such a period.

I hope everyone will work with me to make the comments a better place than it’s been of late.