The Land Down Under: A Commentary on Comments

ALASKA, CP Army Hub Headquarters – The comment section, once a place full of controversy and commentary, but now a neglected and vacant space. What has caused this dramatic decline in the modern army era?

Disclaimer: This post contains the personal views of Superhero123, and not CPAH’s as an organization.

Army news websites today are definitely different than the ones that ran in the original Club Penguin era. Some claim that the post quality has changed, for the better or for the worse, others state that there has been no high quality news source after the CP Army Central. In my opinion though, the Army Hub has done a great job as a news outlet that comes in par with the level of CPAC for the most of its history. However, there is one striking difference that a veteran who hasn’t checked a news website since CPAC will notice when reading a CPAH post. The almost complete lack of comments.

If you joined the community after 2017, this will most likely not sound like a big deal to you. Isn’t Discord enough to host discussion over posts? In this post I will elaborate on why I feel like this isn’t the case, on a probably futile attempt to reignite the spark of CPA news post comments.

Let’s start with a view on a view into what I call the “CPAC Commenting Culture”. In the pre-Discord era, with CPAC Xat chat being barely used by anyone, they were pretty much the only way to propagandize views across different armies. This is extremely important in real-life political conflicts for obvious reasons, and one of the biggest fears of totalitarian regimes. However, like many other very real political situations, this applies to armies as well. Army leaders and troops constantly used the CPAC comment section to push their own agendas in order to benefit their very own armies. This often sparked interesting debates and conversations, which admittedly sometimes CPAC didn’t take action to prevent them from becoming flame wars.

A nice propaganda meme.

But the comment section wasn’t just used for this purpose. It was often just random members of the community wanting to have their voice heard, a voice that otherwise none would hear. It was their chance to critisize armies, leaders, and even the news outlet itself for moves they considered unjust, and to also provide their advise on how to improve their community. If it was on CPAC comment section, then the message would reach a significant part of the community. And everyone knew that.

Members of the community debate over CPAC’s policies, with even the CEO stepping in.

With the help of Kingfunks4 I found two of the most impressive pieces of CPAC comment sections. The first one is a post titled “CPAC Special Report: ACP Caught Green Handed“, written by ZingKingTo with over 500 comments.

The second one is titled, “CPAC Special Report: The Dorito Dissection“, written by Zakster, with over 300 comments.

By looking through those comment sections you will see some familiar names, still around in the community (2015 isn’t THAT long ago after all).  You will also see an alteration between people chanting their army’s name, people arguing over army politics, trolls, and high quality constructive crisitisms. On other posts people have even shared works of art like poems and army-related drawings. But by far the most important thing you will observe is a collection of the state and thoughts of the then army community, unaltered and unfiltered, serving the preservation of CPA history like no other medium.

And this is the key but not only reason a why, in my opinion, discussions over Discord servers aren’t enough to replace the need for an active comment section. Don’t get me wrong, both are needed and should be used. Discord serves as a way for instant discussion over an issue. However, a comment section’s more formal approach to writing makes it irreplaceable when it comes to getting your point across and generating high level discussions about army nature, which reach depths rarely approached on the chaos of CPAH main chat.

I really hope I will observe a more active comment section after this post. If not, well, at least I tried.

What do YOU think? Let us know in the comment section below!

Superhero123

CPAH Developer

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