I suggest that Iranian.com allows only registered users to leave comments on the site. Also, I suggest that the emails of the people who register be verified. That, hopefully, will reduce the number of trolls and harassments in comments.
The rest of this post is about why I think Iranian.com should do that. You can ignore it if you agree with me!
Many newspapers and big sites have done that and it had good results, because people will be a little more accountable when they hold an online identity (even if their user name is “taapaaleh!”)
In case of the UF student who got tasered on campus at John Kerry’s talk, two local papers ran several articles. Only one of the papers required registration. The paper with no registration requirement got about 200 times more comments than the other one, but they were much nastier, full with chert o pert, hate speech, and racists/sexist comments.
When you read something that you think is B.S, it’s so easy to go right ahead and write chert o pert without bothering to register or sign in. In fact, you might do it couple of times, under various anonymous names. But when you take that little time to register or sign in, you might then think about writing more substantively, or at least you might not bother to register couple of times to open various accounts.
I don’t remember that, but does Iranian.com ask for email verification for registration? If not, I urge Jahanashah and his team to do that. The chances of posting chert o pert comments under various nicknames will even go lower if email verification becomes necessary. Fewer people will bother to open couple of email accounts to register various accounts. Only the persistent ones will do that, and persistent people are fun somehow!
When someone has one nickname in Iranian.com, then she might try to act more responsibly, so not to be considered as a troll by the community and be considered more credible in the discussions.
And the last but not the least, registration and verification do not violate the “nothing is sacred” rule, as much as deleting comments does.
Hope to see more netiquette in our beloved website/community.
