From 6 November 2026 you can comment and reply under news articles and on pages where discussion is turned on. You can read without an account. Writing, replying and voting need an account.
Every comment is moderated before it is shown. Blocked words are masked, the text is classified, and other people's votes can collapse a comment or remove it from the list.
Where the discussion sits
The block is called Discussion and sits under the article or page. On private pages you see it only if you are allowed to open the page. If discussion is turned off for an article, there are no comments there.
A comment is 2 to 2000 characters. HTML is stripped, so what remains is plain text. Replies attach to the comment, up to five levels below the first post. After that, no further reply is possible.
Your name
Publicly you appear as your first name and the first letter of your last name, for example Kai P. If the name is missing, the label stays Kunde. The team sees the full name so a post can be tied to the account if it is abused.
Moderation when you save
Saving runs two checks.
- Word list. Matches from the block list are replaced with asterisks in the text that is shown. The rest of the comment stays readable.
- Classification. The text is checked for tone, insults, hate, threats and unsubstantiated fraud claims. That produces one of three decisions: show, collapse or withhold.
Show means the comment is open in the list. We automatically add a vote from you at +1, so it starts at 1. You can remove that vote the same way as any other vote.
Collapse means the comment starts folded and can still be opened. That happens when the tone is very negative, when a fraud claim has no concrete point that can be followed, or when a negative comment also contains insults. The moderation deduction is 5.
Withhold means the comment text is not shown. A short reason appears instead, and the entry is collapsed. That applies to hate, threats and strongly toxic language. The moderation deduction is 10.
On your own comment you also see the classification note: summary, reason, sentiment and toxicity. The team sees the same note. Other readers do not. If the comment is withheld, everyone sees the reason instead of the text.
Privacy of the AI classification
Before classification we remove personal data from the comment text. Classification uses this cleaned text.
Processing takes place primarily on our self-hosted server in the European Union. We may have the classification carried out in addition, or instead, by a cloud AI, in particular OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic. Those services then receive only the cleaned comment text. We store the result on the comment for as long as the comment is stored.
The legal basis is our legitimate interest in a factual comment section. The details are in the privacy notice, in the section on comments and classification.
Votes hide comments too
Each comment has up and down. Up is +1, down is -1. Choosing the same direction again removes your vote. The other direction replaces it. You have one vote per comment. Without an account you can see the score, but you cannot vote.
The score on screen is the sum of the votes plus the deduction from classification.
- At -5 or below the comment is collapsed. You can still open it.
- At -10 or below the comment leaves the list, including the replies under it, unless moderation has already withheld it. Withheld comments stay visible as a notice, collapsed, and their score is not shown above -10.
Comments are sorted by score, highest first. If the score is the same, the newer comment is on top.
What the team can still change
We can hide a comment or show it again. Hiding replaces the text with the reason. Showing it again clears the moderation deduction. The votes stay. A comment that is visible again can collapse or leave the list if more downvotes arrive.
Product reviews
Product reviews use the same classification and the same vote thresholds. This article describes the discussion under news and pages.