Hey everybody, it’s that time again when I need your help with commenting on SOFREP. We get a ton of comments on our articles, and it’s important to us that everybody feels that they have a chance to respond to our writers and to each other. We like the informal community feel of SOFREP.com, and want to keep the commenting as open and engaging as possible. Our writers are pretty intelligent and bring a lot of information to their articles, but I think the commenters on SOFREP are equally as good. We’re constantly learning from and intrigued by our commenters (that’s you guys).

But as we all know, there are people who just should not be allowed on the Internet, and unfortunately some of them rear their ugly heads here on SOFREP. And despite the modest gating that we use (we require Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or LiveFyre authentication), we still get trolls and ranters and extremists. We don’t get much spam, thankfully.

We had a team of moderators until a few months back. At that time I felt that there was simply too much moderation, and it was too overt, so I put the moderator team on hiatus to see how we would do without moderation.

So I want to get your take on the state of commenting on SOFREP. Is it great? Does it suck? Are you afraid to engage for fear of reprisal? Do you wake up early just to get in there and chat it up with other readers?

And I also want to know what you think of our (lack of) moderators. Do you know that you can actively moderate by flagging comments with that little flag button? Is that ‘self-policing’ enough? Do you feel that we need to increase our comment moderation? 

I appreciate your time on this, as always. You tell us what you want – we hope to keep delivering!