LtTony wrote:

LOL. It was that thick in the 60s when I delivered it as a kid. A lot of the guts would arrive on Saturday, and they would have to be stuffed into the news sections Sunday morning at zer0 dark thirty. Lot of work. I could hardly fit them on my bike; I think there were Sundays when I had to make two trips.

Never actually had a paper route, but subbed for my friends any number of times, definitely hard work.

GoDucks2020 wrote:

I just have to wonder, how much in ad revenue the Oregonian could have been taking in if they had let the comments remain. Speaking for myself, I hardly check the site anymore, maybe once or twice a week. Whereas before, I was checking the site multiple times a day, a lot of that being to read the latest in comments. I don’t think I’m alone in doing that either.

It’s sad to see executive incompetence leading to the downfall of a once highly respected and proud organization.

would have been good to have the O-Live Comments humming these last few months, with not much else going on and plenty to jabber about.

in the end, it was costing Newhouse/Advance Pubs too much to moderate the forums through a third-party sub-contractor. you can only automate so much . . . like flagging keywords (the usual George Carlin suspects, or 'Heimlich'). it's labor-intensive for a real live person to review each comment flagged by the system or by another user.

O-Live missed the chance to get a handle on the mess 4-5 years back, when they migrated the forum onto a new platform. they could have limited user access to a brick-and-mortar ISP email (Comcast, Cox, Frontier, etc.), a LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter acct--something solid, w traceability that makes it easier to snuff the trolls (like a lot of other comment forums do). the losers who brought down the forum were generating 100s of throwaway accts w gmail, yahoo, outlook.com, and similar services.

instead the peeps @ The O were seduced by the sheer volume of comments. but advertisers were smart enough to know that 150 comments doesn't mean much when 100 are by three people running eight userids, and those three people don't have any disposable income or they wouldn't be spending 15 hours per day commenting. 

sports was a small, untidy corner of the whole mess. it was 20 times worse on the political threads, or what might as well be called the 'culture wars'. I lost count of how many times The O had to shut down comments on topics (the two-mom adopted family that died in Cali, the no-cake-for-you bakery, several others) because of the lunatics. some of those people made Janitor Jimmie B or Looger look relatively normal.

wouldn't be surprised if The O brought back the Comments feature . . . for $10 per month subscribers only. I just won't be one of them.
 

Eugene Register-Guard is currently offering a one-year scrip to the general R-G website plus its dedicated ducksports.com site for $49 per year. good deal.