ooh, up/downvoting has been retrospectively activated on old threads also. this could be interesting.

>Adam K Line … I don’t think that’s the issue. Constructive critism and informed debate is fine, even if it gets a little heated between those who may hold polar opposite views with good reasons supporting them (e.g. a cartoonist and someone who was a fan but may soon not be). Ignorant flaming and outright trolling or abuse is not.

Because of the propensity of comments to devolve into the latter quite often, or otherwise be quite inane, I tend not to bother joining in or often even viewing them unless I either really like a strip, it provokes serious thought, or I feel there’s an error to be corrected. Otherwise it’ll be like AOL invading Usenet all over again. Or worse, Youtube commentary…. ugh.

But I would be sad to see them go completely. Some interesting stuff has been discussed before, and some useful information (e.g. chocolate toxicity for various pets) brought together as a group effort, and this is also how S&W ended up with a separate english language editor IIRC
BTW, the strip has an actual discussion board?

Novil says:
Tuesday, 1 September 2009 at 02:02

@ Alectric: Until now I have banned two users who really deserved it, but banning should always be the last measure against vandals, trolls and hatemongers.

I am now thinking about disabling comments when a strip deals with American politics or the environment since those topics certainly attract the most harmful comments. Something like “That’s l4me!!1” is not doing much harm, but “You should be ashamed to say X in your comic although [followed by an uninformed, heavily biased rant]” does.

Based on what you have written here, I think that you should get rid of the comments section. You are not interested in having your views or the positions you take challenged, you are simply looking for praise.

So…comments disabled then. Interesting.

Beholden – not as smart as they’d like to be.