[JonathanCohen09]

Simon,

a good point therefore;

Dear Site Administrator,

can you please answer the questions that I asked above based on the post from SimonRowberry.

It would be really useful to have your input on this so that we can once and for all put an end to some of the mean, nasty and totally uncalled for posts from some of our fellow contributors.

We all look forward to hearing from you or perhaps from the editor of BT on this issue.

[Tom Otley]

Right, sorry for the delay – I was and am in New York.

We do moderate the forum, and we do remove spam, advertising (well, advertising that hasn’t been paid for!), and personal abuse. However, if I’m honest, we probably don’t read every single post on here, so if we missed some name-calling I apologise.

The background to all of this, however, is that we are journalists, and our primary job is writing the stories that appear here. The forum was added to the website because the “Comment On” function at the bottom of the individual stories is a clumsy way of people having a debate, so we added the forum. In general, it’s worked well. We enjoy reading many of the posts, and hopefully so do you.

I think there’s a sense with moderating this thing that we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

We can remove personal abuse, but by the time we spot it, people have rushed to the defence of the person (or not) and we’d have to remove lots of posts. Should we also remove political posturing that was upsetting some? I don’t think so. If someone from the X political party wants to come on and anonymously tell us that a third runway for Heathrow is a good or bad thing, can’t we have the argument?

I’m sorry if this seems to be us washing our hands of it, but I’m afraid resources-wise that’s about all we can do. There are only a few of us here (although I’m proud that we have what I believe is the largest editorial team dedicated to business travel in the world – though I might be corrected on that) and we do our best.

I’m also not sure how I would enforce people revealing their names (sorry to merge or whatever these threads). I have no way of knowing who any of you are, and if I were to look you up and your email was John Cleese @ gmail.com, does that mean you’ve got a sense of humour, or you are the living genius himself?

[Author]

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