Board Thread:Administrator's noticeboard/@comment-9713132-20121012115558/@comment-1990160-20121013144023

Let's see, as stated, there are hundreds of comments posted every day, and having mods+ go through them is a thankless job. I used to check the comments, by switching my RC to only show 500 comments (about half of those submitted each day), but it's terribly boring. The moderator works for perhaps 15 minutes scrolling down the list, removing any trolling or harassment or obvious things, but they can't follow every conversation/thread on every page. We would need two or three fairly active mods+ to follow comments, but they have no incentive or motivation to moderate. There's no benefit reaped from moderating, except perhaps "making the community a better place." However, League of Legends has a fairly toxic community, and so long as an element of community involvement exists (primarily as comments), this toxicity will bleed over.

A 1-3 day ban, you say? I've looked at the Special:Contributions of vandals and others, and only some come on every day. Most are sporadic, with perhaps a week in between, or even months. They wouldn't notice a slap on the hand 3 day block. Perhaps a no-tolerance policy of infinite (or week-long) ban for any offense would help prevent repeat offenders, but that again requires substantial involvement of the mods.

Personally, comments are an attempt of wikia to merge social media/forums into a site that is meant to be used for information (a wiki). Removing them would be, imo, moving towards a purer site. However, that would come at the cost of losing quite a few visitors, as the modern Internet has social media in all places (ex. commenting on news articles). Following this logic, it becomes a decision between keeping comments to maintain a large (but not a thriving) community to appease the masses, or at the cost of becoming fascists, removing comments in order to cleanse the site of its ills. If we ever wanted to remove comments, the precedent has been to ask for community input and consensus. However, this always inspires a widespread protest. Twice commenting has been disabled. Twice the population has risen up in condemnation of Neon and Nysty. If comments are ever removed, it will have to be the act of admins and admins alone. There would be calls of admin abuse and fascism, but what point is there in getting imaginary internet power if you never abused it?

"Our job as sane people is to be vigilant and not let retards do and get what they want." -RainbowHysteria