We do our best to keep our site’s comments troll- and abuse-free, but there’s always room for improvement. Our new comment reassignment feature allows your comment moderators to dole out warnings and suspensions, and explain why they did so.
The system works like this: If we see a comment that we don’t think belongs in the thread, we can give you a warning and move the comment to a tag page that explains the problem. Those pages include:
* #offtopic: For comments that are just aren’t relevant to the conversation at hand.
* #trolled: For trolls of the internet variety.
* #abuse: For any comment that we find abusive, including hate speech, or attacks or insults to writers or other commenters.
You can also consult our commenter’s guide to io9 if you want further clarification on the perennial question of how to be an opinionated commenter but not get banned.
https://gizmodo.com/the-giant-mega-helpful-guide-to-commenting-on-io9-5507595
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-be-an-opinionated-commenter-on-io9-and-not-get-d-5031824
We will also use these powers for light as well as dark – if you announce an event we’ll move it to #calendar, or if you start a really great thread but it’s going off-topic we’ll put in in our open discussion forum called #observationdeck so you can keep chatting on other subjects.
In a nutshell, this new functionality gives us the opportunity to bring a lot more clarity into our comment admin process, and helps commenters understand what doesn’t fly.
If you’d like more information about participating in the io9 comment community, read our Mega-Helpful Guide to Commenting on io9.