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ARTFORUM demotes Talkback

PostPosted: Sun Jan 20, 2013 6:11 am
by CAP
They haven’t entirely done away with comments, but you get the feeling this is on the way to dropping the whole idea of an interactive readership. Firstly they’ve dropped the Talkback button from their navigation bar. So to find comments you have to try one of the other pages like 500 words or Picks and then see if the item has comments enabled at the bottom of it. Click on that and you get to the comments page, which used to be called Talkback. You can still submit comment independent of one of their articles, but now it’s published without an author’s tag or byline. I don’t know what the thinking behind that is, apart from further discouragement.

I’ve reported before on items AF has censored or removed from Talkback – not because they’re offensive or libelous but just because AF doesn’t like some of the criticism hitting too close to home, or getting too expansive. Occasionally they allow spam to go undetected or unremoved there, so you have to wonder how closely they monitor it anyway. The feeling is it’s fairly arbitrary, depending on circumstance and personality. Not a good look for a magazine priding itself on intellectual rigour and curiousity.
8-)

Re: ARTFORUM demotes Talkback

PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 2:26 am
by CAP
UPDATE: Some backend tampering since has returned an author's tag to comments. :)