A couple of weeks ago, a pair of posts by David Brauer here and here about the almost-anything-goes commenting at startribune.com attracted more than 50 comments about comments.

I was pleasantly surprised that so many of the commenters stated their conclusion that MinnPost’s policy produced the most civil comment threads of all local media. My favorite was by Bill Gleason, who wrote:  “Having left a lot of comments on a lot of sites -- I have to reluctantly conclude that MinnPost's rules are the best....”

MinnPost requires commenters to register with their real names, and all comments are screened by volunteer moderators before being posted.

MinnPost’s commenters, for the most part, police themselves.  Of 17,466 comments submitted from launch less than two years ago through yesterday, only 968 -- less than 6% -- have been rejected. 

But even a good policy can be improved upon, and we see a need for a tweak.  We already reject comments for name-calling and inflammatory speech, for self-promoting, and for irrelevance to the topic, but we’re seeing an uncivil pattern among some comments that we have been accepting: snideness, or gratuitous insult of the intelligence or character of fellow commenters and others.

From now on, we will reject comments that refer to other people’s comments (or the commenters themselves) as vapid, nonsensical and so on. 

The vast majority of MinnPost’s commenters do a great job of adding value to our stories with facts, personal experiences and substantive arguments.  The few who don’t will find more of their submissions rejected.  

If you think that my position here is mindless, or I’m some kind of nut or petty dictator, you’re entitled to your opinion, of course. But don’t bother submitting a comment expressing it, because it won’t be published here.