Such as...

You know people complain about Ghostcrawler being harsh on the forums when the people on the forums are his main source of revenue. However, like Ghostcrawler, WoW.com probably realizes the trolls aren't their main source of revenue and simply don't care if they manage to drive some of them off.

The bulk of the readers of WoW.com probably have never been so much as tempted to read the comments, much less comment in them. If the articles were as bad as you claimed, they'd simply stop coming back to the site.

Oddly enough, there's always people like you on the blogs I read (not just WoW.com or WoW related blogs) complaining about the quality of the writing, talking about how things used to be better. I can never understand why if they're so miserable reading the blog they don't move on to find better quality writing. The local library has some classics if the blogosphere fails to provide. Alas, they keep coming back for more.

Most of the poorly (if at all) fact-checked stuff put forth by Frostheim and Dawn Moore?

The commenters on this site, and on the official forums, do not represent anything beyond a percent of a percent of total readership. It's just a fact, there's really no argument to be had. You all are important in the community, but numbers-wise people who comment here (and on the official forums) are very very very small in comparison to everyone.

And Devv, at best, your numbers are significantly off by a large magnitude. Please don't try to represent numbers that you don't know.

Yes, so if comments aren't a major source of revenue and don't represent a large amount of the traffic, the best way to reward those who contribute, even in a way you may disagree with, is to talk down to them and make sure that they feel no need to further contribute, yes?

If you don't want negative comments, just turn off comments. Clearly they're not a major source of concern or revenue so why not?

I largely stopped commenting quite a while ago when all I ever saw in response to what I assumed were legitimate concerns or viewpoints, were flippant responses that conveyed nothing more than an 'I'm the blogger, you're the commenter therefore you are wrong' response. That's not a two-way communication deserving of respect.

So if you're going to lambast the few people who do decide to comment, it'd be nice if you'd do the same for the authors.

Even further, it'd be nice to see who exactly IS downvoting the comments.

It would be wonderful to have some transparency so that people know that it's not just a handful of people who work for the blog who do it immediately so that people disregard comments they don't appreciate. I assume that the commenting system will fully bury a comment after only a small number of negative votes, it'd be nice to know for sure that it's not a sock puppet procedure. Especially when it happens so rapidly.

Okay, Dave, fair enough.

I'm down-voting your comment.

We're not interested in turning off comments on the site, although the option has been discussed.

We're also not interested, as authors, in shooting down anyone who disagrees with us -- but I do encourage the staff to respond respectfully to people when they bring up legitimate concerns (and "get rid of author X" is not a legitimate concern, it's nothing more than trolling).

There also is no need for tin-foil hats. We don't go around and downrate comments, and there's absolutely no way for myself or others to downvote a comment automatically. It takes a certain number of people for a comment to become grayed out (i don't even know what this number is), but I can tell you it's not being done by the authors.

Commenters are an important part of the community, but just like everything there has to be some ground rules; which is the point of this article and subsequent participation.

@Mattias

Which articles? What about them? What evidence do you have that they are wrong?

If you want to convince me of something, you have to present the information to me, because I'm not going to do the legwork to find out what was wrong and why and what proof you have that they are wrong.

The burden of proof falls upon those who are make the claim.

Yep...the people who downrate you for being a douche are all just "mindless fanboi sheep".

/facepalm

Agreed... short one paragraph articles about next to nothing clogging up the feed are a turn off and bound to get a lot of comments that aren't going to be great.
I read about half the articles on the sites comments anyhow thanks to things like 'first' admittedly but I actually read only a bit more than half the articles. Some of them I see and just move onto the next right off.
Commenting itself is a pain on here as it is since I use firefox and you can't click the login button on that.

As a reader and commenter I've downvoted a few comments. I obviously don't work for the site. Maybe from now on when I down vote a comment I'll leave a brief comment about why I did so, if that would satisfy a few concerns expressed here.

That your comments at this point are downrated Dave, are not the opinions of the authors.

They are the opinions of the readers.

The readers say: I downrate your comment.
In turn that means: Most people do not agree with you.

Mattias Mar 21st 2010 3:26PM
'' Most of the poorly (if at all) fact-checked stuff put forth by Frostheim and Dawn Moore? ''

Sorry but I struggle to see how you can have issue with Frostheim's writing, I've been reading his blog over at WHU for quite some time, and recently here on WoW aswell, and the quality of everything he does is still good. An occasional error (not that I have seen one) should be forgiven if the quality of content is good! (IMHO)

@hassashu
"The readers say: I downrate your comment.
In turn that means: Most people do not agree with you."

Your comment about the reason for the downvote, while apparently correct, is completely contrary to the author's point:

"Upvote/downvote comments to indicate merit rather than agreement."

I have seen replies upvoted on this site that said nothing more than "^ this". Yes, this comment effectively communicates agreement with the previous comment, however it does nothing to further the discussion. I've also seen plenty of well written and thoughtful comments downvoted into obscurity simply because they disagreed with the majority opinion.

I am in complete agreement with Lisa on this point. Rank the comments on their merits.