When you register for this news forum, you have to agree to their Terms of Use.
http://www.wral.com/rs/page/1080092/
In these Terms, all members agree not to:
By using our site, you agree that you will not post or otherwise make available any content or material that:
* is profane, sexually explicit, tortious, vulgar, obscene, libelous, abusive, misleading or unlawful, or infringes the rights of others or interferes with the ability of others to enjoy WRAL.com;
* harasses, degrades, intimidates or is hateful toward an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability;
* harms minors in any way;
* impersonates any person or entity, including, but not limited to, a WRAL.com employee or another WRAL.com.com member, or that falsely states or otherwise misrepresents your affiliation with a person or entity;
* includes personal or identifying information about another person without that person's explicit consent;
* is false, deceptive, misleading, deceitful or misinformative;
* is non-local or otherwise irrelevant;
* infringes any copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret or other proprietary rights of any party;
* you do not have a right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships (such as inside information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements);
* constitutes or includes unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, "junk mail, " "spam, " "chain letters, " "pyramid schemes, " or any other form of unauthorized solicitation;
* contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of the WRAL.com Web site or any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment;
* interferes with or disrupts the WRAL.com.com service or servers or networks connected to WRAL.com.com, or disobeys any requirements, procedures, policies or regulations of networks connected to the WRAL.com.com;
* intentionally or unintentionally violates any applicable local, state, national or international law;
* provides material support or resources (or conceals or disguises the nature, location, source, or ownership of material support or resources) to any organization(s) designated by the United States government as a foreign terrorist organization pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Prohibited Behavior Includes:
You further agree that you will not:
* contact anyone who has asked not to be contacted;
* engage in personal attacks, harass or threaten, question the motives behind others' posts or comments, deliberately inflame or disrupt the conversation, or air personal grievances about other members of the community.
* collect personal data about, or the e-mail addresses of, other WRAL.com.com members for commercial or unlawful purposes or for purposes of sending unsolicited commercial e-mail;
* repeatedly post the same or similar content or otherwise impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure;
* take or cause to be taken any action that disrupts the normal flow of postings and dialogue on WRAL.com (such as submitting an excessive number of messages - i.e., a flooding attack), or that otherwise negatively affects other members' ability to use the WRAL.com site and/or services;
* use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from WRAL.com.com. Exception is made for Internet search engines (e.g., Google) and non-commercial public archives (e.g., archive.org) that comply with our Terms of Use.

But then they do nothing to enforce these rules, even after numerous complaints to the WRAL General Manager by members of the site.

Because of this, the product has become saturated with trolls posting repeated libelous statements about members, and even when these libelous statements are brought to the attention of WRAL's GM, he does absolutely nothing to protect the users of his company's forum.

The trolls flag blogs and comments with no basis for doing so because no "terms" were violated by the blogger or commenter, sending the blogger's groups and profile into limbo - then these items stay flagged for eons, never reviewed by anyone at WRAL to see if they abide by the rules or not.

They have even done so throwing people's membership into "troll comas" where they can post nothing, yet they have done nothing wrong, necessitating the opening of another member account so posting can continue, and this has happened to me more times than I can remember.

If we have to agree to obey the Terms of Use, then is it not assumed that someone at the company will be watching to ensure the "terms" are followed?

Yet despite I would guess dozens, if not hundreds, of emailed and telephoned complaints, WRAL does nothing.

In the meantime, their membership "appears" to grow because of people having to open new accounts after having their old accounts attacked by trolls. That makes it look like the product has far more members than it actually does, and because these forums have advertising in them, we can't help but wonder if WRAL is doing this to scam their advertisers into thinking there's more people on the boards than there actually are.

For instance, as of this date, the membership total is 20, 624, when we know only about 40-50 regular members post daily.

It's no way to sail a ship, and something at WRAL needs to do something to get it running right for the benefit of their advertisers and their "good" members.