However, that aside, I agree with the point you really wanted to make, completely.

I agree with you that setting a comment quota for a certain time period will not alleviate the problem of poor quality conservation with libel, tangents, and unrelated material. The Guardian probably realizes that this is common for news (or any other type) sites that have active comment sections. Usually a few people will get into a tiff about something like what one them actually meant when they wrote “is.” It is President Clinton deja vu.

My suggestion is that sites have internal staff members (kind of like Netscape.com’s new “anchors”) actively track comment sections. If someone starts an unrelated rant, then a staffer could put a post encouraging others to stay on topic. When a tangent appears, a follow-up question could steer the flow of the conversation back on topic. I guess this could also include trusted commenters who like Wikipedia editors are committed to maintaining high quality.

I think that if staffers are involved it would excite commenters. What if the actually journalist who wrote the story got involved? What about a prominent news analyst or commentator?

But that’s not what I wanted to say. I’ve written about CiF’s comment problems on the site & elsewhere. What they seem to have wanted is something like the comments threads on a blog like Crooked Timber or Stumbling and Mumbling: civil, erudite discussion, between Guardian readers, triggered off by Guardian writers. What they’ve got is a talkboard.

I feel that the fundamental problem is that they’re trying to run a blog, but most of the people involved don’t actually like blogs. On one hand, the Guardian writers involved seem to have been entirely unprepared to have their writing given any sort of fisking, and by and large still seem entirely unwilling to put up with it. On the other hand, the designers of CiF seem to have had some notion of drawing their commenters from the pool of Guardian readers who aren’t already online - bypassing the blogosphere, in other words. Hence the bizarre decision to throw commenting rights open to all-comers, including Guardian talkboard users - rather than, say, starting with the CiF writers themselves and building up gradually, vetting applications as they came in. And hence Georgina Henry’s evident disappointment that so many commenters are… that sort of person.

I think it’s a mess, in other words, but a mess of their own devising.