I hadn't really considered that it should scale, anymore than you would ask how to write the articles themselves without doing it all by hand.<p>Comments close after a period of time, so it shouldn't scale temporally, comments for a large site with lots of authors, well, they have lots of authors.<p>If you want commentors to be able to suggest corrections indefinitely, then either a wiki is a more suitable medium, or an "email me" link. Depending on what you want to achieve - a communally edited document or a personal reply.<p>As far as newspaper sites go, they go beyond 'comments'; hundreds of comments is in the realm of a forum and deserves some kind of moderators and so on.<p>You want to publish to the world and have the world able to reply to you while you aren't paying attention? That's not going to work. If you want to publish to the world and have the world reply to each other, well that's what people have their own blogs for, surely; why would you want to host that indefinitely?<p>And if you <i>are</i> going to have an abandoned corner of the internet where nobody 'in authority' checks what happens, then you need to rely on the passerby, hopefully give them some tools to step in and help, e.g. several downvotes over several days from different sources = autodelete. I doubt that's a solution; if you could automatically tell who to trust in the first place you wouldn't let the spammy comments be submitted.