I rarely delete comments. Here are the reasons to delete comments:

• If I feel that someone is spamming
• If there is a propaganda-suspiscion
• Childish and offensive comments
• If someone goes on and on trying to prove his point for a lost cause, getting obsessive (I have no time for that)

If I deleted one of your comments because I misjudged it, I am sorry, but I don’t censor people because of their opinion.

Of course, I am only human, if I have a bad day, and someone just really pisses me off, I kick that bastard off my site.

Lately I get a lot of iPhone and anti-iPhone propaganda. I delete most of it.

The other day I had one of those anti-iPhone dudes here that posted a long seemingly prefabricated argumentation in spanish why some spanish woman shouldn’t buy the iPhone. And I had a bad day. So that means hasta la vista. It’s not a spanish site and it’s not meant to be used as a propaganda platform.

Accusing me of censorship after all I allow here (check out the 95% typography post), actually kind of pisses me off, but I have a good day, and it?s a relevant suspicion (are these just the positive posts? – Answer no!)

In the beginning I had a lot of moaning and whining and complaining about my grammar, but recently people became quite nice.

Ah yes, and there was this anonymous stalker, that thried to find a weak point on every single post, trying to bully me on my site. Guess what, I tracked him down and told him, I’d post his crap, if I could use his real name. And guess what again? He didn?t want me to.

So which post did I delete that you felt had a good argument?

I don’t remember all the details on the LA Times wiki debacle, but I suspect that like most big media companies, they figured they could just bolt on community and sell ads on the resulting traffic. The very fact that they were unprepared for the chaos that ensued pretty much proves this out. Anyone who’s managed an online community knows how much tending it takes to be successful. It’s very much like gardening (public, community gardening).

What you can learn from successful startups like Flickr is that 1) you have to spend a lot of time on your site answering questions and helping new users learn their way around, and 2) eventually, you are going to need your user community to help with #1. If you’ve built a valuable resource your users care about, they will want to help out.

But to get there requires trust.

Who do you value more: Journalist Joe who writes a popular column on the site, or User Sally who spends hours in the comment threads, keeping conversations on track and answering questions? They both have an important role to play.

So — I’d flatten the user roles by combining Journalist, Amateur, and Commenter.

Requiring registration, the ability to flag objectionable content, ban users, and having an attentive human moderator will allow you to protect the space you’ve created while trusting your users.

As for Jeff’s comment on structured data, it’s true that wiki pages don’t include that as a default. But I wonder if you couldn’t achieve much of the same thing (without the db efficiencies, of course) by using custom input forms that could translate an obituary, for example, and display it as a microformat? Bit of a hack, I admit.

I’m definitely on Jeff’s side re: semantic, structured data. The advent of the Django (what Ellington CMS is built on) and Ruby on Rails Web app frameworks is really changing the entire software game, and you really need to be thinking about re-evaluating your software strategy.

These frameworks are radically changing how Web apps are developed, deployed and managed. And the risks involved in going with a custom solution can often be lower than customizing a large open source project.