Our own comments on our own comment walls should not be censored or limited by the establishment if Change.org is sincere about truly providing a way to "make a difference". 

Our comment walls are the only way we have on Change.org to communicate publicly and/or advertise what is personally most important to us without a ton of other people's comments obscuring them as happens on blog pages.

For Change.org to remove our own comments that have been on our own comment walls before the limitations were imposed (without even notifying us that they were doing so) is not a way to improve the site or facilitate rapport between members or between the establishment and its members.

Further, endless surprise changes discourage people and make it difficult if not impossible to learn how to function EFFICIENTLY on the site and have driven many valuable and active members away.

For members to not be aware of changes in advance also eliminates the possibility for Change.org to receive feedback about the changes BEFORE doing tons of time-consuming work.

THEREFORE,
We the undersigned respectfully request that

1. the character limitations of OUR OWN comments on OUR OWN comment walls be eliminated; 
2. there never be any limitations on how many comments we are allowed to write on OUR OWN comment walls;
3. OUR OWN comments which were deleted by the establishment be reinstated to OUR OWN comment walls;
4. Change.org begin a.s.a.p. to notify us of intended changes. This requested notification process could easily be accomplished using the same notification used to communicate top actions of the week, etc that is sent to those of us who do not block these email communications.

To limit what others write on our comment walls makes a lot of sense because they MAY be unwelcome intrusions, tho this is not really a problem as long as we can continue to be notified of and delete other people's comments if/when we choose and therefore this limitation is perhaps not even necessary.

Thank you,
Truly,

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                                                                       END PETITION TEXT
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FYI UPDATE 12/11 evening

Ani L.,

Ben Rattray sent you a private message on Change.org.
{12/11/09 2:35amPST}
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responding to your concerns

Thanks for the note/petition, Ani.  Overall I think you make a great point about the need for us to better communicate with the community when we're making changes.  This has been difficult thus far because so much is going on right now, but we're hoping to get a full-time community manager soon who will really help with communication on stuff like this.  

 

To respond specifically to your questions:

1. The restrictions on posting more than 5 comments to your own wall was actually not intentional, but rather an oversight in our code.  This was meant to only apply to people who are not your friend (to avoid spam - we figure if someone posted more than 5 times and wasn't your friend by then, they were probably spamming), and wasn't meant to extend to users for their own walls.  This will be fixed by the weekend.

2. I spoke with everyone on our team and as well as our records and there is no indication that anyone has been deleting posts from anyone's walls.  Users may delete comments from their own walls, but we haven't done any of this.  Do you mean that you're not able to view old comments from your wall that no longer appear on your main profile page?

3. I'll ask our CTO whether we can remove the limitation on characters posted to your own wall.

Thanks - I hope all is well,

Ben
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I have let Ben know that there were indeed posts on my wall that are no longer there. 
I would be curious to know if anyone else had the same experience. 
Based on the above info, my guess is that the comments that were deleted on my wall were way too long and perhaps too formatted for the new "codes" to digest --- another "oversight"?

IMIO, since there did not used to be character limitations, I cannot imagine why the current limitations cannot be removed.
I would prefer to eliminate ALL limitations on our comment walls allowing each of us to accept/delete comments as we choose. 
If someone is an unwanted pest, that person should be dealt with individually according to the specific situation rather than via a limitation on everyone else's communications across the board.   
Personally, I would prefer to know who the pests are and what kind of pest than having them censored by program limitations.
~als
p.s. Thankyou, *C* n Andrew for your excellent comments.
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UPDATE TO THE UPDATE:

Hi all,

These issues, as Ben pointed out some time ago, have been fixed. If you're still having issues, or have any other suggestions, please contact me directly at justin@change.org and I'll do my best to make sure they get fixed as quickly as possible.

All the best,

Justin

Community Manager