Thumbs up to our thumbs up and down

Here at the Taupo¯ & Tu¯ rangi Weekender one piece of reader feedback we often get is that the thumbs up and downs are people’s first-read part of the paper.

There’s been some classics over the years — the person who rode a horse along a domain, “pooing all the way” (which one? horse or rider?). The young woman complained about several years ago for running naked along Forest Rd every evening — sadly, that one remains unverified, despite one reader’s gallant attempts. He claimed to have walked up and down the road for miles every night in an attempt to see the woman but was disappointed. No, I don’t know who the naked runner was, please stop asking.

For us, we love receiving them and so many of them are heartwarming tales of people going out of their way to help others, to be kind to animals, to care for our environment. Others are deserved hat-tips to good service or a person going over and above to help a customer, even when there’s no financial reward in it for them.

More problematic are the thumbs downs. Recently we received one: “Thumbs down to the Weekender for taking so much detail out of thumbs downs they become meaningless.”

Ah well. Media law. What a bummer, eh. It’s the main reason thumbs downs have to be edited or discarded all together, because they’re bagging somebody or something that can be identified, while the sender themselves is anonymous. We do explain this every week in our thumbs up and down rules at the bottom of the column. As long as your thumbs up or down meets the rules, it will be published. And if it isn’t, there’s a good reason why not.

Some aren’t printed because they are defamatory. Some are incorrect. Some are irrelevant. Some are so confusingly worded it’s hard to tell what the writer is trying to say. And some of them are just plain mean.

At the Weekender we try to be generally decent people. So, nasty thumbs downs don’t really sit well with our ethos. And, if you think some of the ones that do get published are mean, believe me, you don’t want to read some of the bitter little missives that never make it out of the email inbox. Thankfully, those ones are few and far between.

So, keep them coming people. We love your thumbs up and downs.