A member suggested this a few years ago but I was largely unsure how it would affect the community. I thought we had been doing well without it so far so why mess with it.

Years later, I added the ability for people to flag and report comments. I meant for this to be a feature where people can report the worst of the worst like someone posting someone else's home address (ie. doxing). As soon as I put it up, we were absolutely flooded with reports on comments of which 99% were due to disagreements between members. Despite trying different ways to let reporters know that the comment reporting feature was not to be used for disagreements, the reports on comments kept on coming. We couldn't do much about 99% of those reports since most didn't break the TOU. We largely suggest that members that don't want to have anything to do with each other just use the block button and move on but for whatever reason, many don't take this approach and go to war.

I'm instituting the comment vote today to try to give members an outlet to express agreement or disagreement with a particular comment. It's an experiment we'll try to both curb trolling through downvotes as well as help members feel like they're not alone on an issue through upvotes. Comment votes are then tallied into a member's comment reputation visible on their profile similar to other sites like Reddit. For now, only top-level comments in stories and blogs can be voted on.

I've added as many security features on comment voting as the server can handle to make it very difficult to influence their reputation through fraudulent votes. As such, a person's total comment vote won't necessarily be reflected on their comment reputation stat due to these security features. Only comments three days old or newer can be voted on to prevent someone (or a group of someones) from trying to go on a mass downvote or upvote campaign of someone's old comments.

I don't usually like to talk about security on blog posts because, well, would-be-hackers read my posts too but I do add a new obvious requirement before you're able to vote on comments: you need to have a verified e-mail on your account before you can vote. We're probably one of the last few remaining big sites that still don't require an e-mail address. That's made the job of fighting spam and vote fraud very difficult but I wanted to keep membership as open as possible by not requiring e-mails. On the other hand, we'll require a verified e-mail just for comment voting to try to help reduce vote fraud. I know you guys are sick of "shops" and I've been doing a lot on that front behind the scenes. I just can't write blog posts about what we're doing about them for the same reason as above. If verified e-mails work well on reducing comment vote fraud, I may expand it to other aspects of the site to help curb overall fraud.

Anyway, this is probably one of the longer blog posts I've written in a while but it's a big update with possibly large social ramifications. Some of you may be wary of this change, especially some of the pioneer members, but I am too. If these changes don't work, we'll take them off. Otherwise, I hope we get a friendlier community out of it.