There is a fine balance between providing public value with broad appeal to the majority of licence fee payers on the one hand, while at the same time keeping up with new technology and experiences.

One of the areas we are spending a lot of time on is "comments".

BBC web properties have several ways of accepting user contributions, newsgathering, user generated content, comments, discussions or what ever you want to call it.

In the next week a group of us - from telly, radio, news and online - are putting together a presentation on our future requirements. We already have a long, long lists of ideas, but we need to know what the community actually wants.

I recently Twittered about this and got some interesting replies:

- @tomVS could I add 'switching off comments' to your list ;)

- @tomVS I hope you are including threaded commenting.

These are interesting ideas, and we've already put together a lot of others.

But I'd like to know what you think. We need the ideas before lunch on Monday, 1 December.

Use our (existing) commenting system below to build a wish list about our (future) commenting system.

Add your voice, about your voice...

Tom Van Aardt is Communities Editor, BBC Future Media & Technology

N.B.Tom has also posted a thread about comments on the Points of View message board.

After John Sergeant pulled out, we had an incredible response on the BBC message boards on Wednesday 19 November.

Eventually, I decided to close the Strictly Come Dancing board at 22:00 so the moderators could work through the backlog of messages. Personally I think Paul on the Central Communities Team and our external moderation provider did an amazing job to try and keep this under control.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of what happened.

We had an increasing number of messages in the moderation queue during the day. The Communities Team and our external partners kept me informed as the numbers kept steadily rising, and by lunch time the queue was extraordinarily high.

At half past three we were already two hours behind on moderating comments, meaning something that got posted at 13:26 was only appearing at 15:25. On a busy day we get new messages checked and posted within less than an hour.

By late afternoon we had all our internal and external moderators on it, we had reduced the number of pre-modded posts for new users down to 3, and we had our own super-mod on it (and he can do 400 comments per hour - accurately!)

By five p.m. we had to cut the new user pre-modding down to two, and then one. It was clear that the problem was being caused by new users wanting to comment, and as all new users are pre-modded before any of their comments are shown, the queue kept on growing.

Between five and six we had dropped the pre-modding down to one, and the "speedbump" was moved up from three minutes to five minutes. This is a time restriction between posts so that people can't use a BBC message board like instant messaging. We had hoped that this would allow us to bring the queue down to something manageable.

To give you an idea, we get worried when a queue reaches 500-600 unmoderated comments. By late afternoon we were running at over 2000 coments. This was in spite of putting all mods on there together along with all the temporary rule changes.

For the last hour of the day we started lifting restrictions on other boards (such as Points of View) to alleviate the burden on moderators and get them to focus on Strictly Come Dancing. We tried for one final hour before six to get the queue down, and hoped that as people left work at six the comments would stop rolling in.

Unfortunately this didn't happen, and the queue kept growing. After seven it was clear to me that we were going to have a problem overnight - the Central Communities Team had to go home at some point, and we normally only have one moderator on duty throughout the night as we close most boards for commenting.

Broadly speaking I had two options open to me as we went past 8 p.m.:

Lift the rule on pre-modding comments from new users, effectively opening up the boards to anyone and everyone without managing the input

Or

Close the SCD board at ten, and start working on this again Thursday morning while the mods worked through the night to clear the backlog.

Our primary responsibilities are towards the community and the BBC's editorial values.

I didn't want to run the risk of having a free, open board - especially one attracting so many comments. I'd rather run the risk of being accused of censorship than have libellous, abusive, racist or otherwise damaging content.

Judging by the comments Paul received when he posted the closure notice we did the right thing. In fact, most of the comments commended the team and asked us to clean up the Strictly board even more.

Tom van Aardt is Communities Editor, BBC Future Media & Technology

(N.B. Editor's note 7.25 p.m. The final two paragraphs in this post have been removed as they contain factual inaccuracies. I'll update you with some better numbers and more detail tomorrow (NR))

If you do, you'll use a BBC system called DNA. It powers most of the comments, message boards, forums, blog comments, spaces and other social media applications across bbc.co.uk.

Just think of all the comments on 606, Robert Peston's blog, h2g2, the Archers message board, CBBC boards and many, many more...

On the morning of Thursday October 9th, there was a major code release - three months' worth of updates and fixes were scheduled to go live after extensive testing on the staging server. Usually, releases happen monthly, but due to the Olympics, we didn't release over summer.

The DNA team had planned on rolling out between 7 and 10am, but because of the popularity of Peston's Picks, the blog team felt we couldn't take any chances.

So the developers came in early and took down DNA between 4 and 6am. By 7am, everything was done, the software was back up and everything was working fine. By 10am, all was still well, until the central communities team picked up a minor little problem. Some threads on a single message board were being automatically closed. It wasn't a major problem; rather a minor problem that needed an urgent fix.

Paul and Jay from our communities team ran between their desks and the developer team to try and identify and to isolate the problem. Working closely with Mark and Mark on Martin's DNA developer team, they quickly identified the offending line of code.

Because DNA is used in so many different ways on so many different parts of the BBC website, it's very difficult to set up tests that exactly mimic all the possible different permutations. Very occasionally, a problem will slip through the net.

In less than an hour, the problem was identified and the one line of code was fixed. There were less than 500 threads affected, but they still needed to be reopened. Once again, Paul and the DNA team jumped in and put together a script implementing some of our moderation rules, sort of in reverse, to fix the problem. Shortly after 11am, this was run, and we were back to normal.

Or so we thought.

Sport contacted us saying that a lot of their threads were still closed - the fix had apparently not worked for them. The 606 service is by far the biggest single platform using DNA. Luckily, this turned out to be a caching issue, as we have to cache their boards because they're so big. The cache was cleared and 606 was back to its wild ways.

Not everyone was happy, though, as this unhappy 606 poster posted:

Why am I getting this message, I've been a member since 2006 not yesterday, how is that new 606 has been a complete mess today, sort it out

At the end of business on Thursday, it was also clear that we had another problem: the so-called "new user hole". Despite being around for a while, some users were identified as brand new users. This also meant their comments didn't show up immediately, as they were pre-modded in accordance to our house rules.

However, this turned out to affect only 24 users out of all the tens of thousands, and was fixed by close of business on Friday.

By noon on Thursday, members of the DNA team had already put in more than eight hours at the office. The central communities team had helped them to fix all the problems less than two hours after the first issues cropped up.

There was no data loss at any stage, everything was back to normal and the central communities team was just in time for a boring weekly team meeting.

Join in - leave a comment and become a DNA user yourself.

Tom Van Aardt is Communities Editor, bbc.co.uk.