[darrellmaurina]

Kristinn, I read your link last night to the “Palin hairdresser” controversy (i.e., her daughter) and ended up spending several hours reading the articles, trackbacks, Twitter links, and related articles on this controversy.

I'm pretty sure I gave this a cursory read back in 2010 — if I remember right, one of our own local readers even posted a crosslink on the Pulaski County Web to your Free Republic coverage on the Palin hairdresser situation since he's been a Free Republic fan for many years — but I didn't realize at the time how critical Free Republic was in exposing this ridiculous situation.

Great work!

“Crowdsourcing” is not a panacea, but getting hundreds of angry activists to catch and call attention to stuff like this can quite effectively expose and embarrass people who need to be called on the carpet.

If Free Republic's new section can lead to this sort of thing being done more often, and localized to state-level and congressional races, it would be fantastic.

[Lazamataz]

Darrell, I read with great interest your series of posts to Jim. I believe you have valid points. I also believe that there is a defense against some of those points, that Jim pointed out. To summarize, you stated that there was a possibility of legal liability on an individual basis if we began hard reporting. While this may have some truth, we actually have that situation now, with people writing comments on the articles.

I feel it would be an outrageous stretch for anyone to sue on a comment on a news item, and would end up with the Righthaven sort of smackdown that the litigant would deserve. Since the article is an extension of the comment ability, the very same would attain there as well. Yes, there is some theoretical liability, but I don't feel it to be a substantial risk.

However, even this remote risk does speak to one feature that I would love to see employed on this Freeper Editorial Sidebar (and this is where JohnRob comes in): It would be a great asset to the moderation of that sidebar if,

1. Articles posted to that sidebar where vetted first for an assessment of appropriate levels of quality, an inspection for possible legal vulnerabilities (ex: calling Ted Kennedy a drunk would not expose anyone to a problem, but falsely claiming Ted Kennedy had seven DUI's would), and vetting for best-practice use of English spelling and grammar. Bottom line for JohnRob would be that nothing posts to that forum sidebar before an Admin approves it. They queue up instead.

   2) Once certain posters have earned their chops, perhaps they might be thought of as Regular Contributors (such as are featured in some of the news websites) and they might get an ability to post right away. If there was a problem, the article or opinion piece could be taken down in retrospect.

I understand this might take some new coding, but I don't see this as too formidable a programming task. Right John? I mean, if you had it all done in dotNet, it should be easy! Oh wait, you did it in Perl. ;)