Dear Chris Silk: In my view this community-based popularity and social bookmarking function is not a _community_ service. Our community needs to have, hear, and not be able to so facilely discredit observations that are not popular. One click away is too deep in the Memory Hole for most Americans, particularly Neapolitans. If you change this function to accord better with the principles of free speech and free press, please let me know. Thank you. Drs. John & Karen Dwyer Pax Christi Naples On Mar 10, 2007, at 3:49 AM, Silk, Chris wrote: Hello: The Naples Daily News and the MultiMedia staff at naplesnews.com have very little to do with the grey boxes. Please allow me to explain how the grey box function work. The system is modeled after the popular community-based popularity and social bookmarking Web site digg.com. Each comment users make on naplesnews.com can be rated; each comment starts out with a ZERO or "neutral" rating. Other users can vote a maximum of ONCE on whether they find the comment useful to the discourse of the conversation. As users vote, the plus/minus scale on the comment slides back and forth. Comments with a neutral or positive rating remain open for viewing. Comments with a negative rating are hidden from immediate view but can be seen with a single click. There must be a minimum of THREE votes on any single comment before it is hidden. Please note that this entire process is user-driven. No staff member from the Daily News makes any sort of decision on finding a comment "useful" or "not useful." Virtually the only interaction the staff has on the forums is to remove comments which violate our user agreement. We hope that this process will bring an additional level of interactivity to our forums, while also allowing users a voice in policing the forums. Thank you for your interest in the Naples Daily News and naplesnews.com. Chris Silk Site Manager | naplesnews.com -----Original Message----- From: dwyerj1@comcast.net [mailto:dwyerj1@comcast.net] Sent: Thu 3/8/2007 5:32 PM To: Silk, Chris; Aten, Tim; Keomanyvong, Vonna; Hanson, Tom; Moritz, Eric Subject: Grey outs feedback: There's no one to write about the blog regulations and policies. I'm very offended by having many of my well-thought out blogs labeled "Most users found this comment not to be useful. Click to show." My blogs always abide by the "rules" written in the blog agreement, but are frequently blocked in this way. Why is that? Are you trying to cut me off or make me so disgusted that I'll stop writing? paper: Naples Daily News email: dwyerj1@comcast.net name: John Dwyer