Kiwiblog has long had problems with lack of moderation. David Farrar can write good posts, and there are a lot of knowledgeable commenters who are worth looking out for, but the comments have been blighted by abuse and highly questionable agendas.
The Christchurch mosque terror attacks, and responses in comments at Kiwiblog, have finally prompted Farrar into taking more action.
It’;s difficult enough moderating a small blog like this, especially when some people are persistent and determined to do as they please despite requests and warnings to comply with fairly liberal guidelines.
Monitoring a blog the size of Kiwiblog is a huge task. It’s common for posts to have hundreds of comments throughout the day and night.
Due to lax moderation for years it is an even bigger task trying to get things under control there.
Yesterday:
General Debate 18 March 2019
Comments turned off until I have had time to delete and sanction those who have crossed the line.
UPDATE: Comments now back on. But they will not appear until manually approved. Those lacking in empathy will probably not appear.
This was a drastic step. I’m not sure when comments were turned off, or on again with moderation, but the comment rate slowed down considerably.
And later in PM announces inquiry
The last comment at Kiwiblog appears to have been posted at at 9:20 pm last night, so something significant is obviously going on there. Time will tell how that pans out.
However moderation and comments go now there it will be a major challenge changing the widespread perception that Kiwiblog is an abusive and toxic environment, with racism, political abuse and white supremacy issues.
Whale Oil has been heavily moderated for years, but that has largely been for message control and manipulation.
Comments there yesterday indicate that they still have problems with some of their content, both in posts and in comments. They may have stopped swearing, but they still allow political abuse, and anti-immigrant and ansi-Muslim sentiments.
They have started today with much of the same old anti-Muslim lines (that Farrar appears to be trying to claamp down on): https://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2019/03/face-of-the-day-1906/
Your NZ 
I need to test some moderation settings. Can someone who be online for the next 20 minutes or so indicate in this thread if they can help by posting some test comments once I tell them to.