F1 Fanatic

It is very childish when a discussion ends up in a Youtube quality biased argument. When it gets personal Keith I’d send an email directly to those involved and remind them you have their IP addresses and will report any trolling to the police. They’re actually interested nowadays.

@ECWDanSelby Interesting idea but remember this all takes time. The longer I take moderating comments/sending emails, the less time I have to write articles, develop the site, arrange advertising and all the other stuff I have to do to keep the site running.

Personally, I think the ‘line’ as it stands at the present moment strikes a pretty good balance between allowing a passionate and sometimes heated discourse whilst ensuring that truly inflammatory and abusive comments are filtered out at the same time.

I like to think that the membership here – both regulars and occasional posters alike – are a highly knowledgeable bunch. If someone comes along with an uneducated, stupid or weakly argued opinion, I like to think that they will be challenged about it in the form of comment responses that illustrate the holes in their arguments. I’ve had quite a few arguments with many different people over the years about DRS, the qualifying format, Ferrari, KERS, Eddie Jordan, Tilke, BBC/Sky, HRT and Kartikeyan and many more. I think if you’re going to post on a site like this and try to argue a case, which is often what people do in article comments, you should expect to be challenged about it. The important thing is that people should remain respectful when doing so at all times. The moment you become disrespectful, you’ve destroyed both the discussion and your own credibility.

I can never and will never claim to be impartial or very neutral in any way. I’m a Sauber fan who loves Kobyashi, Perez and Webber and who hates Ferrari and a few particular drivers who shall remain nameless. But I like to think that I have always justified and explained why I do so and that the reasons for this have always been substantial and not petty. At the same time, I don’t let my dislike of a driver prevent me from giving them credit when it is due and by the same token try not to let my love of a team or driver prevent me from criticising them when they deserve it. When it comes to controversies such as Hamilton/Massa, I always make sure to judge each individual case on its own merits and consider both arguments and both sides of the story before making my own decisions based on the facts. I think as long as we encourage others to do the same, we will continue to get well-informed, reasonably argued comments as a result. If we all let the reactionary, n00bish comments to take over – “HAMILTON IS WORST DRIVER EVAR LOL” – that would be a problem. But like I said, I think the key to containing those more irritating comments comes from people in the community challenging those who post them with intelligent, considered responses, rather than by taking the hard-line approach of removing or filtering them out.

Obviously, there are some comments which are just plain disrespectful, abusive or vulgar and they should absolutely be removed. But I don’t think allegations of bias or favouritism should be clamped down on too much. The fact is these sorts of comments are unfounded and aren’t backed-up with strong reasoning. I honestly think the best thing to do is to let people continue to shout ‘bias’ and ‘favouritism’ all they want and until they can produce actual evidence of it, we’ll all continue to destroy those claims by ourselves.

Unfortunately I just think it’s a case of being a victim of your own well-deserved success. A site can only grow so much before “respectable” (those who will hunt down and seek a good forum rather than the most popular one) posters dry up and the balance swings in favour of those with strong partisan opinions and with a style more disposed to banter than sharing ideas.

As ever, it is your site to run as you see fit, to ban certain comments, filter certain words, even ban users. If we don’t like it, we can go elsewhere; as consumers (this is your living after all) we have that choice.

But as you say, the issue goes further than that. You don’t want to balance things just to get the maximum possible numbers, you want a good community. That inevitably means being the bad guy and not tolerating disruptive comments, no matter who they come from (including regulars like me! Only a few are 100% innocent on this front). I’m not sure what you can really do differently that you’re not doing now anyway, but I guess this is why you put such questions out, to find out!

But yes, I would say my main point is for us regulars to remember not to stoop to this level too, or we set a bad example.

I’m always in favour of keeping speech as free as possible. But then again, taking @Magnificent-Geoffrey‘s example, comments like “HAMILTON IS WORST DRIVER EVAR LOL” is a difficult one. It’s an opinion, albeit an entirely unconstructive one, but why would you want to stop people expressing that opinion? Where do you draw the line?

You can’t ask every commenter to provide a full, reasoned justification for their post, because most people just won’t do it. On forums like this, I think you just have to take the rough with the smooth.

There’s too many grey areas, IMHO, to completely eliminate “trolls”. So I say establish clear, simple guidelines and stick to them. Personally, I think the F1F guidelines are already adequate but then I don’t mind ignoring the comments that are irrelevant, stupid or just wrong.

I’m a moderator on a creative writing discussion list, and it’s really difficult to find a balance between allowing free speech and condoning unconstructive time wasters. We tend to take it on a case-by-case basis if someone is being really disruptive while at the same time skirting around the edges of acceptability (the biggest problem we have is people that are either stinking writers or total idiots, or both), but with a slightly less active forum and a bigger team of moderators dedicated to the task I suspect it’s easier than managing F1F.

Keith, have you considered delegating some of the admin work on the main site in a similar way to the liveblogs (or have you done so already)?

Can I be totally honest here?

I am a massive fan of this site. I love the community and the debate. I love Keith and all of his hard work, and I’ve seen first-hand how much nonsense he has to filter out and put up with each day. It really is absurd and I couldn’t believe there were people as sad as these trolls on our planet. I’m also in awe of Keith’s time-management. I cannot keep up with commenting on the site most of the time – yet Keith manages to write amazing articles, read every comment, reply to a lot of them, delete the nonsense, run the live-blog, keep everyone entertained on Twitter AND reply to queries and questions via email. This is just a standard Sunday for our hero! :P

Meanwhile, I’m getting out of bed and wondering where I’m going to find the time between sleeping and laying about doing nothing to read his work….

I agree with @Magnificent-Geoffrey. Comments challenging Keith’s impartiality shouldn’t be met with too much of a reaction. Sometimes, it can be a simple misunderstanding. I feel it is important at this point to mention that I have never in my 3 years (or whatever it is) of reading Keith’s articles come across anything I’ve found to be biased. Keith is a blogger, but he’s also become an incredibly trustworthy source for information and even breaking news. The articles on this site are always impartial from what I can tell, but at the same time, I can appreciate that people have differing views.

If someone questions Keith about bias, I think they should be treated with as much respect as anyone else. I understand that it gets tiring when you have to answer to these critics all of the time (we see how often you have to), but I think the thing that’s going to keep people coming back is the welcoming and friendly atmosphere of the site. If their comment gets pounced upon by anyone, they may be scared off. I like reading peoples’ opinions and everyone deserves to state what they feel. If it’s unreasonable or as Geoff said, just plain trolling, then it deserves nothing more than to be deleted instantly. But often, people just need things explained. Someone could visit F1F and think Keith is a Ferrari-loving, Jenson Button-hating fanboy, but if this person can be spoken to in a polite and non-confrontational manner, they should – if they’re a decent person – understand where they went wrong and that it was a misinterpretation.

I’m not saying Keith should allow people to bash his site, but the less strongly-worded comments probably deserve to be treated more gently.

I think generally the standard of discussion here is great, and it helps that when accusations of bias fly, they seems to come from trolls rather than regulars. There will always be people trolling and making unsubstantiated claims of bias, but although sometimes they are annoying- especially when they accuse Keith- I find mostly they don’t take much away from the site.