Cleaning Messy Message Boards

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Companies such as Neighborhood America provide language filters that let sites like ABCnews.com (DIS) search comments for specific words or phrases, or words located within a certain frequency of other words that indicate a post may be problematic, says Neighborhood America Chief Executive David Bankston. For example, the software lets site administrators search for the word "hate" in proximity to words describing an ethnic or religious group. "That way you're able to do a quick scan of what the comment is saying," Bankston says.

Not all the problematic posts are negative. For example, there are users who may want to flood ABC's site with exclamations of love or adoration for a particular on-air personality. They may be nice, says Bankston, but they don't do anything to promote conversation about a particular story. The company is working on other automated tools that will recognize images of naked bodies in video comment posts and automatically remove them.

Community Policing

Some sites leave much of the filtering up to the message-board users in hopes that the community will promote the appropriate level of decorum. Slashdot, an aggregation and comment site for what it calls "nerd-oriented news," has a revolving group of community moderators that are able to promote or demote comments through a scoring system. The goal, according to Slashdot's own FAQ message board, is to make the readers of the site take responsibility for what appears on it. Slashdot also gives comments higher scores when users are logged in and thus have a unique identity to which their comments can be tied.

Digg's system has a similar registration process by which users develop a reputation from their posts. The hope is that users will want to have a reputation for insightful thoughts and not, as the online community calls people who consistently post pointlessly negative comments, being a "flaming troll."

Adelson says Digg is working on additional moderation tools. "I haven't seen a perfect solution to the problem," says Adelson. "Digg has only just scratched the surface with its tools."

Perhaps the best moderation tool, says Jarvis, is joining in the conversation. He believes that if site owners and publications respond to commenters, users will consider the boards a place for adult conversation rather than a place for venomous rants.

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York .