Los Angeles Times removes wikitorials, posts note about user abuse

By Diana Day. Posted: 2005-06-20

The Los Angeles Times has removed its wikitorials apparently because of "inappropriate material." The Opinion page has the same brief note as the above link.

See related OJR story.

Comments:

From Robert Niles on June 21, 2005 at 11:40 AM

The Times follows up today with a staff story, laying blame at readers who flooded the site with pornographic images. A N.Y. Times story quotes the L.A. Times deputy editorial page editor, Michael Newman, laying blame on a massive influx of readers from Slashdot.

A couple more thoughts: Many interactive features achieve "security through obscurity." No one but a few like-minded folks know about the feature, so no trolling mars the site. But high-profile features such as The Times' need to protect themselves from trolls. The simplest way to keep porn images off a site is to set its software to reject images. Either write a regular expression that strips all HTML tags, or if you want to allow some tags, configure the software to reject the "img src" tag that embeds images within a post.

Serious online publishers ought to employ technical help at least as savvy as those who seek to destroy or deminish the publishers' work. Hobbyists can get away with plug-'n-play, off-the-shelf online publishing solutions. Pros ought to know better.