One of the many challenges we face here at HometownAnnapolis.com is handling the commenting portion of our website. Each individual article, blog post, and some other content pages have the capacity for comments to be appended by our web visitors.

Often times, differences in opinion will erupt heated discussions. Sometimes these lead to flame wars where a few participants begin personal attacks. While this is not a normally a huge problem, it can be exacerbated when someone intentionally posts derogatory comments in hopes that it will get people riled up. 

A little less often we've faced problems with SPAM messages being posted, although fortunately our requirement that all users must register in order to participate in commenting severely hampers a spammer's desire to post.

Profanity comes through every so often as well.

In all of these cases, the clear-cut abuses are usually easy to spot and remove. But, despite common belief, we are not capable of staffing 24/7 to keep watch on the commenting system. We rely on the community of users to take part in our process by reporting abuses. It is surprising how little that takes place.

Our report abuse system has a built-in protection mechanism that will trigger if it seems like an inordinate number of people are reporting abuse for a particular item. It will remove comments pending further review by HometownAnnapolis.com staff.

When problem users become apparent, they will be handled according to the level of problem they are causing. It is our hope that with appropriate warnings, the behavior can be corrected. If not we will exercise our right to delete/suspend the user account. This is not a foolproof solution - one does not exist for truly determined users, and they will likely end up back at our sites using another account complete with phony name, email and IP address. This is yet another reason why the Report Abuse function is so important. The active users will catch these things before we will.

One should use discretion with the Report Abuse feature as that too can be abused. It should not be used to report differences of opinion.