Editorial Policy on Certain Comments

For the last few months an anonymous poster has been frequently leaving comments that are disruptive, personal attacks and that have certainly not helped create meaningful or useful discussion.

(This was first posted in August 2009.)

Because these comments seem to be written with the intention of creating a negative emotional response rather than any sort of constructive debate, because they are based on assumptions that are not always true, because they rarely address the substance of articles directly, and because there has now been a long history of similar, repetitious comments, we have decided to hide all similar comments by this poster on our news wire.

Allowing anonymous comments means that it can be difficult to figure out where comments are coming from. As far as we can tell, there is a single poster and he has mostly posted as "anonymous", but sometimes has used "Revolutionary Alliance of the Working Class." It's possible that these posts are coming from different sources, but we doubt it. In any case, any posts that contain similar language and tone to the posts we have seen will be hidden.

The one exception will be this thread. We will just be following our standard editorial policy here.