We are working flat out on the Livestation chat room moderation tools following a massive surge in usage because of the Gaza story.

With between 100 and 500 people chatting about the ongoing situation in the Al Jazeera chat room (and on other channels) in real time and at speed, we needed a total rethink about how the process worked.

Although keen to preserve freedom of expression, we needed to find ways to enable people to ignore spammers and those pushing hate speech.

However, seeing as this is probably the first time people have been able to watch exclusive pictures of a war situation and chat in real time, from anywhere in the world, it’s not surprising that some comments have been extremely offensive to many.

The new tools will be in place as soon (we’re aiming for next week).

The Riz Khan show on Al Jazeera is a regular user of the live, instant chat on Livestation with comments fed through to the live studio debate and appearing on air each night, Monday to Thursday at 20:30 GMT

Jari