To the Editor,

I liked your explanation of why Politicsweb will keep its comments open (see here). 

I saw this line and thought you might like a response: "Currently BDlive does not have a comment-section, for reasons which are somewhat obscure, and the Rand Daily Mail has not had one since its inception.”

The BDlive comment section was doing quite well until a point last year when the technology supporting it failed dramatically. We have nearly completed building a new comments facility for BDlive, which should be active very soon. The disappearance of comments on our sites was not due to any sinister intervention – it was purely a matter of complicated technologies no longer working together as they should.

We expect to roll out the same new tech on SowetanLIVE (which still has a comments facility at the moment, though it is also malfunctioning technically – hence a lot of spam getting through) and TimesLIVE in some way to allow readers to comment on articles. We will also consider adding comments to RDM.co.za in time.

As is the case with the Daily Maverick, we just don’t have the resources to have full-time moderation of comments on our websites. Therefore we have to find a way to allow comments on most of our prominent content balanced by the ability of our teams to keep an eye on it. That’s something we’ll try to achieve over time. 

Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions.

Regards,

Riaan Wolmarans

Head of digital audience development

Times Media Group