The Newsroom

The blogosphere is relatively new territory for newspapers, and over the past several months, we at The Sun have learned a lot about what drives legitimate discussion and what stands in its way. In that time, we've allowed comments that were, arguably, mean-spirited, groundless or just so off base that it ultimately compromised our own credibility.

We're in the process now of cleaning up and removing posts that don't meet the standard of a reasonable community discussion on a given topic, and, moving forward, will insist on the following:

- No name calling, character assassination or unfounded accusations. Posts that cross this line will be removed, and commenters that continue to engage in this kind of activity will be banned.
- Community policing. Because of volume, we're not going to screen comments before they're posted. We will review them during the day, but we ask that you help, by letting us know when posts cross the line. You can contact me directly at steve.lambert@inlandnewspapers.com, our senior content editor Louis Amestoy at louis.amestoy@inlandnewspapers.com or our City Desk at citydes@inlandnewspapers.com.
- No "comment trees." If it becomes apparent that a commenter is using his or her email network to flood our blogs, those posts will be removed.

Obviously, there's a great deal of discretion that needs to be exercised here. The line between a genuine expression of frustration and venomous commentary can be a gray one. We also don't want to discourage members of the community from weighing in on topics that touch them in one way or another.

In fact, we hope these rules have the opposite effect - encouraging you to engage in a discussion without fear of having your character attacked. For this reason, we will continue to allow anonymous posts, recognizing the sense of security that comes with that. However, we will review this and our discussion standards generally in the weeks and months ahead.