This may not be a popular suggestion, but I think it has to be said.
The news comments have become a waste of space. More often than not they degrade into a trail of bitching, insults, racial slurs and often comments that completely irrelevant to the topic.
Refer to this latest thread as an example:
http://www.sumea.com.au/snews.asp?news=2630
There are two reasons for this:
1. They are not as moderated as the forum (or tat least they don?t appear to be), and
2. they allow anonymous posters (Anonymous Coward)
So I suggest that news comments be scrapped, and replaced with a new system whereby posters are directed to the forum to voice their opinion. I have seen some sites that do this via a ?comments? link that automatically creates a new forum topic for the first poster, and afterwards directs subsequent posters to that thread.
The functionality would be almost identical to how it works now, but users would be required to post under their forum name, and threads can be easier moderated.LiveWire2007-02-22 02:58:07
Yeh, we've had this discussion before about Sumea comments and we've come to the conclusion that more moderation is needed. I don't want to remove Sumea comments because it's very much integrated into the site, and I've invested a lot of time developing on it (it's all xml based, I can remove posts easily via the admin area, and there's functionality such as voting etc which will be used much more later on). There's also a wealth of great threads on news items, and it would be a shame to just remove them all and replace it with the forum.
I do realize that there is a problem with anonymous posting, but it probably needs more diligent moderation on my part. Feel free to click the "report comment abuse" button to lock threads if you see any that are turning to crap. I check news comments abuse reports every day.
/signed
In my eyes news comments should be used for two reasons.
1) To add additional relevant information to the news post.
2) To intelligently debate the content of the original news post.
I'm sick of seeing the anonymous news comments be used for things like:
Krome suxorz, they is lam3. Or Ps3 is da sh*tz it's so much bettrr then Wii.