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My fellow editor, Paul Walter, has been doing some extensive work to regulate the trolls who sometimes emerge on Lib Dem Voice.

As he reminded us last week, we ask commenters to stick to just one name. You can use a pseudonym (that’s because some readers are politically restricted) but you should be consistent. We do ask for a valid email address. Recently Paul has identified a couple of individuals who each use multiple names and they have been put on permanent moderation.

We also ask you to avoid personal attacks – by all means disagree with whatever is expressed in a post or comment, but don’t make unpleasant accusations about the person who made them.

If your comment is put into moderation don’t take it personally. It will probably be because you used one of our trigger words, which in some contexts could be offensive. We editors are all volunteers with other commitments beyond Lib Dem Voice, so sometimes it takes a while before one of us is able to check through the comments sitting in the Pending file and release those that are fine.

All this is to ensure that the space below the line is safe for anyone who wishes to comment.

But whilst we have been reasonably successful in keeping the discussions civilized, we are still not attracting enough women to contribute or comment. Yesterday we published five posts – all written by men – which produced 63 comments. Not a single one of those comments was written by a woman.