I wanted to respond to some interesting discussions about the moderation we've applied to comments about the 'footballer injunction' that has received so much coverage during the last few days. Following the naming of the footballer in Parliament I will, as much as I can, explain where we are drawing the line with moderation, and explain why some of you have had your comments removed for saying things everyone is saying on Twitter.

As it stands as I write this, on the BBC website, you can say that the footballer who had an injunction in place regarding an alleged affair with Imogen Thomas, was named in Parliament as being Ryan Giggs. But the word 'alleged' is important - any statement that for example an affair, or blackmail took place is likely to result in your comment being removed due to the potential for defamation which the BBC - or indeed you - may not have sufficient proof to defend. In addition as the injunction has still not been lifted we are still technically bound by its provisions. However, we have taken the view that we are able to report the parliamentary proceedings.

To those of you who use Facebook and Twitter, these rules probably seem quite strict. Injunctions, super or not, are difficult to moderate due to the secrecy around them, and particularly in a widely reported instance like this. The situation also changes quickly - the Sun newspaper had an application to lift the injunction rejected both before and after Giggs was named. We've had to update our guidance to the moderators on recent injunctions several times, speaking to the BBC lawyers to see what we could legally publish as more information became public.

I accept though that there may be times when the moderators have been over-cautious. If you believe this applies to your comment, you can make use of our appeals procedure. However, if you're one of those users who had me working at 11.30 on Saturday evening due to your increasingly creative ways of trying to breach the injunction, your appeal probably doesn't stand much chance of success...

But some of you are probably asking: 'Does the BBC need to moderate comments about the injunction at all?'

Unfortunately, much of the reporting of this issue has wrongly been characterised as 'print media vs the Internet'. The question is really whether the big social media sites - with companies and servers based outside the UK - are out of the jurisdiction of an injunction imposed by English courts. This question might be answered in the coming months. What's not in doubt is whether the BBC website is subject to the injunction. It is, and it's worth noting that the BBC has in the past been compelled by the courts to hand over the details of users accounts in the same way Twitter has been asked to do so in this case.

As I've written before it's worth remembering that there are often valid reasons for reporting restrictions and injunctions, and this may prove to be the case this time.

Finally, the majority of comments across the BBC website are reactively moderated, so if your comment has been removed and you've seen another similar one that hasn't, that's probably why.

Paul Wakely is Editor, Moderation Services for BBC Online

When I ran my moderation 'clinics' last year on the PM and BBC Internet blogs and the Points of View message board, I found that many of the same questions about moderation kept cropping up, and some of you also told me that you rarely got an answer if you replied directly to the moderation emails you were sent. So firstly, we had to make sure that you did get replies when you ought to, and secondly that more FAQs would often help you find that information for yourself.

It's taken far longer than I would have liked, but a few weeks ago we introduced a redesigned help section for the BBC message boards with expanded FAQs about moderation and added more information to the BBC blogs help. And today we are introducing a new appeals process for the times when you feel the moderators have got it seriously wrong.

The old system relied on you responding to a moderation email and was devised when we had half a dozen community sites using the DNA moderation system. However, with nearly 300 different blogs, boards, community sites and comments systems now using DNA, it became impossible to even maintain the folders, let alone ensure that all the teams responsible were responding to your moderation queries. Often, the sheer volume of moderation emails - particularly if someone had gone on the rampage with the alert button - made it very hard for teams to find your mails. In time we'd like to find a more elegant way to inform you that your comment has been removed, but for now we had to continue using email.

As well as all the email folders, people who wanted to complain about moderation would write to radio station and TV programme inboxes, post to the boards, phone BBC information or email the BBC Complaints department (who only handle complaints regarding content produced by the BBC, not by the public as your messages and comments are). This all caused duplication and wasted your licence fee.

So from now on, my team will handle all appeals and complaints in the first instance, asking hosts, bloggers or production teams for more information if necessary. The moderation failure emails are shorter and contain a link to more information about the rule your contribution was deemed to have broken. If you wish to appeal you can contact us via the feedback forms on /blogs and /messageboards. You will get an initial response within 10 working days, and if you are unhappy with the outcome, an opportunity to continue with the appeal procedure. If you have restrictions placed on your account, you can also appeal with the new process.

There are some conditions for appeals and we also ask that you make the basis of your appeal clear - general comments about moderation, the BBC, or the state of Britain today will be read but won't result in the decision about your comment being reviewed.  So please say why you consider your post didn't break the rule that it was failed under. Remember the appeal is about your contribution, so "but he was doing it too!" does not constitute an appeal.

For some of our, um, more regular correspondents, we also now have an expedited complaints policy. Sadly, looking at our inbox it seems I also need to point out that any abusive emails will be ignored and might result in a ban if unpleasant enough.

Nobody likes having their comment removed, or their alert rebuffed by the mods, so moderation will never be the most popular aspect of the BBC website. But I hope these changes will help to make moderation clearer, fairer, and more consistent.

Note: I've generally linked to the help material on /blogs here, but all the appeals info is also on the messageboard help pages.

Paul Wakely is Editor, Moderation Services, BBC Online.

The key points are that if you are standing as a candidate, you should declare this if you wish to comment on the BBC website. Also, we don't allow sloganeering or campaigning in your comments, or attempts to run polls. And of course the usual rules about defamation and offence apply, so be careful when you comment about your MP fiddling his expenses that your post is truthful and not too rude...

Social media looks likely to be a significant battleground in this election and we know that it's not always going to be an easy task to differentiate between abuse of the boards and genuine weight of public opinion, but it's important that the BBC doesn't let discussions be hi-jacked by any particular party or group. If we suspect organised campaigns are distorting the views represented we may take action to remove comments or premoderate or restrict accounts but be assured we absolutely won't be using moderation to influence the balance of views on a site, and will only step in to deal with foul play. For example, sock-puppeting breaks the terms of the website regarding the misuse of multiple accounts and could mean their permanent closure.

Above all, we have a legal obligation to treat the elections fairly and we want to ensure that you can debate the issues in an open and lively way. We look forward to reading thousands of comments that are informative, constructive, and relevant to the debate.

You can help make our task easier. Much of the election discussion will take place on the political blogs and Have Your Say and we ask that you take time to find the most relevant areas for your comments. We may remove your contributions if they don't relate to the topic of the blog or board. This doesn't mean we don't want you to post them, it's just that we'd like you to do it where there are other people who want to discuss them and the appropriate BBC staff reading them. If we've devoted resources to running a discussion on the leaders' debates for example, it seems reasonable to ask that you don't start your own on the gardening messageboard.

Polling day itself is treated rather differently by all media outlets and I'll post again nearer the time to make clear how we'll be moderating on May 6th.

If you wish to email the moderation team about the election rules, or have other general moderation queries, you can contact us via this form.

Paul Wakely is Editor, Moderation Services, BBC Online.

It's fair to say that we get a lot of complaints about the moderation of the various social media services on the BBC. Even Jonathan Ross can't unite the users of BBC Online in communal rage in quite the same way as moderation can.

Sadly, a large proportion of these complaints are inevitable. On a reactively moderated service - where most material is only looked at by the moderators as the result of a complaint by another user - it's a fact of moderation life that half of the people involved in each decision will be unhappy. If someone complains about another user's comment, then the complainant will be annoyed if the moderator rejects the complaint and leaves the comment up. If they uphold the complaint and remove the comment, the person who posted it feels hard done by.

So we expect some flak from both sides.

That's not to say that moderators don't make mistakes, and improvements can't be made. The trick for us is to communicate our decisions and policy more effectively while avoiding costly one-to-one discussions over individual posts. This is why we're looking at the notification emails and the help pages, so if you don't understand why your content was removed you can find further explanation without needing to write to us. We'll keep adding clarifications to these pages as we answer your queries.

Some things aren't going to change. In particular, we get a lot of requests for the moderators to write individual notifications when they fail something, pointing out exactly where the post broke the rules rather than the standard emails that are generated by the moderation process. We simply can't do this, at least not without several million pounds that we're not going to get (sorry Sutara). If you only use a few of the hundreds of BBC sites that the moderators work across, it's hard to imagine the impact of any extra time added to the moderation process, but even a small amount of time costs a lot of money. What we can do is rewrite the failure emails to make them clearer, and add more thorough explanation of the reasons why content is removed to the help pages on the site. We're trialling the first of some proposed changes here on the Internet blog from today, so if any of you are unfortunate enough to have a post removed, please leave a comment here to let me know whether you were any the wiser as to why.

We think the BBC goes much further than our peers in explaining moderation decisions and allowing right of reply when content is removed, as well it should. However, if you think there are other big companies that are doing a better job than us, do please give me examples so I can nick these ideas we can strive to improve in this area.

For a few hours this afternoon on the I'll be on a Points of View BBC topic thread, answering queries as best I can about the way we moderate the boards. Anything useful that comes out of it can be added to our help pages, and if it works well we might make it a regular thread. So please leave a comment below, or join the discussion on POV if you want your say about moderation on the BBC.

Paul Wakely is Content Producer, BBC Online

I'm the producer of the BBC Central Communities Team, which means I work across most BBC services dealing with moderation issues. This is the last post in a series of three about some of the legal issues that we face when moderating the BBC's blogs, message boards and communities. I've written about defamation and contempt of court, but probably the trickiest for us to deal with are specific reporting restrictions.

Reporting restrictions are court orders that prohibit the release of specific information such as the names and addresses of witnesses, defendants, or young people involved in court cases. They can be imposed for a variety of reasons, such as to protect young or vulnerable witnesses or defendants, or because other trials are pending and release of the information could prevent a fair trial.

There are two things that make reporting restrictions so difficult to moderate. The first problem is that in many cases I couldn't even tell you what these restrictions are without risking prosecution, but as an example they currently include a bar on any new information being reported on the case of 13 year-old father Alfie. Sometimes communicating this to our users without giving away the information is hard - simply saying 'We removed your post but can't tell you why for legal reasons' is bound to frustrate users. It's also one of those areas that seems to fire up conspiracy theorists: 'if the BBC are suppressing the truth on this, then they're definitely hiding something on the moon landings/JFK etc'

But the real challenge is the media that we work in. In print, television or radio complying with these restrictions is easy, but when anyone with access to the internet can publish content, once that information is available somewhere, distribution becomes easy and instantaneous. Many of our services are post or reactively moderated so comments appear straight away. And it's not just our services we have to watch for - we also have to decide whether to remove links to other sources of the information such as social networking sites or archived news stories.

The most famous recent example was the 'Baby P' case, where members of the public - or 'Facebook vigilantes' as the Independent described them - attempted to use social media sites including BBC message boards, to breach the court order forbidding the publishing of his killers' identities. Our moderation teams removed these posts as did those of Facebook, Bebo, the Sun and others, but the information was still widely distributed across the web. While blogs and comments inciting violence against the people convicted would not be acceptable under any rules, the public's desire to distribute this information is perhaps understandable with an emotive issue such as this. And to them our actions probably appear as callous censorship, but publication in breach of any court imposed restriction could seriously interfere with the course of justice or destroy someone's life or liberty as well as bringing the risk of prosecution.

When Martin Belam blogged on this issue last year his post attracted some commenters who thought that discussion of publishers' legal responsibilities implied support for the actions of those protected by the order.

This is of course not the case. A publisher has no alternative but to comply with the restriction, although the BBC and the other media organisations will challenge orders they consider to be legally unjustified and an unneccessary incursion into free speech.

Most restrictions are made for valid reasons - Peter Wilby makes a good case for the Alfie Patten restrictions. Clearly, the BBC has to comply with a restriction or it could face contempt proceedings, cause the collapse of a trial or damage someone's life.

But with the spread of access to internet publishing some people argue that it may prove pointless in the future to try to enforce some of these rulings. In the meantime we have no alternative but to remain mindful of and comply with our legal obligations.

The difficulty of moderating BBC services within the law increases. And the cries of 'censorship' faced by major news organisations are only going to get louder.

Paul Wakely is Content Producer, Future Media & Technology.

Contempt of court law means that we have to avoid publishing comments that "create a substantial risk that the course of public justice will be seriously impeded or prejudiced" in active court proceedings in the UK.

Many people do not realise that criminal proceedings become active as soon as someone has been arrested, so when the news breaks of a high-profile arrest, that's the point at which we have to consider contempt of court when moderating. It's also the point at which everyone wants to comment on the arrest, and often with contributors' emotions running high, many of the comments make it hard for the moderators to strike a balance between allowing fair comment on a case and removing content that could break contempt of court law.

And of course, if a comment assumes the guilt of the suspect, it is potentially libellous as well. How "substantial" the risk a comment to a website can represent is key to a successful prosection of the publisher for contempt. It will depend on several factors including how far off are the court proceedings and how damaging to a fair trial the comment may be.

In any high-profile case journalists always walk a tightrope between trying to satisfy public hunger for information and staying within contempt laws. Newspapers are notorious for testing the limits of contempt of court, and even if comments are intended as a joke, that's no defence, as the BBC has found to its cost.

In printed media, and most radio and television output, it should be easy to make sure that you don't break the law, since it's you who is in charge of what goes on the page or into a broadcast. But when comments appear on a story it becomes far more difficult to limit the risks.

For example, UK contempt law would usually prohibit any reference to the previous conviction(s) of someone facing new court proceedings. This is easy for a TV reporter, they just have to get through a report without accidentally saying "And of course we all remember the defendant from his murders in the Nineties" (though mistakes do happen).

But the current statutory contempt law dates back to 1981, when no-one realised that an internet filled with archived news stories, blog entries, comments and even cached pages would make the exchange of this kind of information easy and immediate. If you aren't aware of contempt of court law it would seem perfectly reasonable when a story breaks to post a link to an archived page and say 'hasn't this bloke done this before?' And under the current laws the BBC moderators would have to have to remove your post.

In my final post, I'll look at reporting restrictions.

Paul Wakely is Content Producer, Future Media & Technology.

Moderation is the most contentious part of managing social media services, and is frequently viewed as simply an attempt to stifle free speech. This is the first of three posts about the legal issues that arise when moderating the BBC's social media sites. The feedback we get suggests that a lot of contributors lay the blame for removing their comments squarely at the feet of the BBC but like everyone else in the country, the BBC has to comply with UK laws, and the comments and posts that the BBC receives and publishes are subject to them.

Caroline Langrishe as Georgina Channing in the third series of 'Judge John Deed'

The first legal concern is defamatory content. Defamation encompasses both slander and libel.

Briefly slander is a spoken defamatory comment and libel refers to comments in written or permanent form such as broadcasts and posts on the internet. A defamatory comment is one that lowers the reputation of an identifiable person or company in the eyes of right thinking members of the public.

The subject of libel is much in the news at the moment as newspapers are arguing that the cost of defending libel actions in the UK is a threat to press freedom.

Of course, as an internet publisher the BBC tries to avoid as far as possible publishing any defamatory comment, and the various types of moderation we use are intended to limit the risks of publishing contributions from the public.

The BBC's moderation teams receive thousands of contributions each day. When we come across ones which we consider potentially risky, then we have to assess the evidence to support them, and sometimes remove them.

This isn't an easy job, particularly where users are referring to - and sometimes extrapolating from - stories they've read in newspapers or on other websites. Just because something has been published elsewhere, is no defence to a libel action. Websites, blog posts, newspapers and (ahem) major public service media organisations can all be the source of libellous stories, so if you repeat them elsewhere there is a risk you could be posting defamatory content.

Finally, I should point out that we don't just remove this material for our own protection. It is possible that legal action can force publishers and ISPs to hand over the details of the contributors who posted the material so that they can make a claim for damages against the individual who made the post. So, please remember that sometimes the moderators might just be on your side.

In Part 2, I'll look at contempt of court.

Paul Wakely is Content Producer, Future Media & Technology.