We would like to let you all know that we are aware of some threatening comments, including personal contact information, that were made toward readers in a recent post. We are taking measures to deal with the situation; the IP addresses for those particular individuals have been blocked, the threatening comments have been removed from public viewing, and we are working out a comment moderation policy that will help discourage those types of statements while allowing commenters to debate freely with one another.
Overall we are always very pleased with the discussions that occur in the comments and the thoughtfulness of many readers (both those who agree with and critique our posts), so we’ve always taken a fairly “hands-off” approach to the comment threads. We don’t want to interfere with readers’ discussions, but clearly we also cannot allow commenters to be personally threatened or to have personal identifying information made public by those threatening violence.
To our readers, we appreciate you and your comments tremendously, and we are sincerely sorry to those who were targeted. We’ll provide a more detailed description of what we decide to do about the comment situation in the August Behind Your Backs post at the end of the month.
Lisa & Gwen
