Mamamia Team Wednesday 5 September 2012 9:48am

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Something changed at Mamamia this week and you can almost hear the sighs of relief.

On Monday we announced a revision of our comment guidelines (which you can read about here.) Comments are such an important part of the Mamamia site and the Mamamia community. We love the way Mamamia readers come to this site to talk, to debate, to offer their differences of opinion.

BUT (yes there’s a but…) as the site’s grown, the dinner party conversation we’ve prided ourselves on has changed. There’s more guests than we’re ever had before and while most have been welcomes with open arms, there have been the occasional gate crashers who’ve brought the tone of conversation down.

As we wrote earlier this week:

Please be clear: you do not have a RIGHT to have your comment published here on Mamamia. Just like you get to decide what comments from other people you leave up on your Facebook wall, we get to decide what is published here. As does every other website.

That’s why we decided the MM team and the MM community moderators need to be more actively deleting any comments that are rude or disrespectful to any of our authors, the MM team or to other commenters. We want you to tell us your opinion. To enter the debate. But if you can’t make your point without being bitchy or snarky or just downright mean  – we don’t want to hear it. And we won’t help you broadcast it to our wonderful community.

Here’s a rundown of our new policy, which appears at the bottom of every post we run on the site:

Imagine you’re at a dinner party. Different opinions are welcome but keep it respectful or the host will show you the door. We have zero tolerance for any abuse of our writers, our editorial team or other commenters. So if you’re rude, mean-spirited, snarky, aggressive, defamatory or bitchy, your comment will be deleted (so will any replies to the original comment – so don’t bother arguing with rude people, instead just hit the ‘alert moderator’ button).

And if you’re offensive, you’ll be blacklisted and all your comments will go directly to spam. Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re going to be – cool. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation…

Anyway, since we made the announcement on Monday, we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive response to the changes.  Our writers are relieved and so are our readers.

Already the site has a nicer feel about it. The debate is still there – but it’s being had nicely. And we’re rapt.

And there’s just one more thing. You’ve probably noticed that Mamamia is one of the few sites where comments appear as soon as they’re posted. But we’re thinking about making a change to that too.

We’re toying with the idea of pre-moderating comments. Pre-moderation is what most sites – like The Punch, Mumbrella and all news sites  – do. Basically, it means that comments will be approved by us BEFORE they go live. It’d be a way for us to make sure that any comments that don’t follow the dinner party rules don’t make it to onto the site.

The key for the conversation to continue to flow is to pre-moderate in as close as possible to real-time and we’re working out how that will be possible.

Your feedback is important to us and we want to hear it. Every couple of weeks we’ll be publishing a feedback post where we can reply to comments and questions about the site more specifically.

Of course, this is still our regular Open Post of the Week so of course we want to hear what’s been happening in your world. The good, the bad and the ugly. Everything is welcome at this party – expect of course those aforementioned comments that break the dinner party rules We will nuke their arses.

Here’s what else has been happening at the Mamamia office and on social media this week.

Tweet from Mia Freedman (@MiaFreedman)

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But enough about us! How’s your week been?