Albany Political Forum

How can we set up a forum where people can be civil? Would you be willing to post under your real name? Why or why not?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 10:47 PMand is filed under Albany Neighborhoods, Albany Police, Albany Politics, Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Albany Political Forum”

  • Dominick Calsolaro Jr. Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 12:11 AM

    You start with a blogger that has a decent following and blogs about the issues that the people of the City care most about. The blog has to start out objective in order to draw in people on both sides of the issues.

    In order to keep the peace the blogger should retain the right to kick people who are trolling and not acting civil off the blog, to keep it about the issues. This could perhaps be accomplished by deleting blocking these trolling users and not allowing someone with that person’s email address to sign up for an account. The blogger would notify the offender that they can get the right to post back with the personal permission of the blogger. I don’t know if this is a valid way to go about having a forum where people can be civil, but I think this could be one alternative.

  • Jim Travers Says:
    September 21st, 2009 at 11:50 AM

    People can always be civil, if they choose to. Precluding some commentators because of their rude comments may not always be best, because once they have been banned it’s unlikely they will continue reading the blog. Once you’ve lost them, their’s little chance you’ll be able to educate them on your views. But of course they should be warned that they’ve gone off the deep end and should curtail their abusive conduct, though banning may be the last resort for unheeding recidivists.

    I use my name because I have no fear of airing my views publicly. Maybe if every poster did we’d see real positive change occur.

  • SomeJoe Says:
    September 27th, 2009 at 11:12 AM

    You’re not going to get civility in an online forum. People aren’t educated in or accustomed to civil discourse. Larger internet discussion sites have mechanisms to allow users to self-moderate to some degree, but none are perfect.

    If you require real names, you’ll have 3 people posting once a month. If you want to read Terry O’Neill, Esq. and Jim Travers from DIA agree with each other at length, that’s what you’ll get.

    Also, if your plan is to be like DIA and astroturf, you’re also not going to get alot of civility.

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