Open Comment Season on John McCain site

While riding home from another excellent Online Community Roundtable, I read this tweet from penguinasana: "Someone left the john mccain store comments unmoderated: http://tinyurl.com/5p3b35".

Yup. Take one part political candidate, one part open review system, and two days of not moderating said commenting system and you get a repeat of the 1997 Amazon Family Circus reviews.

When I took these screen shots there were over 60 reviews along these lines:



Now Amazon eventually got the joke and cleared out the crude stuff, but left the satire up (to the tune of hundreds such reviews for several of the books to this day). I'm not sure what'll happen here. Yanking everything and killing the review system is not the message for a presidential candidate to make: "My staff is clueless in the ways of free association *and* they react by humorlessly clamping down."

Of course, there are ways to roll with this, clean it up and still keep the review system. Step one from the brand new Yahoo Design Pattern Library -- Ratings and Reviews:

"Set expectations regarding when the review will be published."

Which implies that reviews will be moderated. Not an unreasonable expectation.

UPDATE: I checked the morning after this post and they yanked all reviews and killed the reviewing system. My only comment is that you, dear reader, do not make similar mistakes because while McCain voters likely approve of this kind of authoritarian control, your customers or clients likely will not.