When newspapers launched websites and allowed real-time comments on articles, they hoped to establish a new marketplace of ideas.

What has developed, instead, is not as much a marketplace as a really crummy garage sale.

One where the shoppers hide behind card tables and wardrobe racks and call each other morons and idiots, socialists and fascists.

One where good questions and constructive criticism get drowned out or shouted down. The trolls usually win. What they actually win is beyond me.

I’d have no misgivings about naming names here, were there names to name. Since most commenters are anonymous, I don’t know their identities any more than you do.

Which brings us to “almostinnocentbystander,” a commenter at the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

In February, “almost” took an anonymous shot at Kootenai County Republican Party chairwoman Tina Jacobson over $10,000 missing from GOP coffers. Jacobson filed a defamation suit against “almost” in April — and took the Spokesman-Review to court as well.

On July 10, Kootenai County District Judge John Patrick Luster ordered the paper to turn over information identifying “almost.” (Kootenai County GOP activist Linda Cook, however, came in from the cold Monday and identified herself as “almost.”)

Yes, the prospect of being “outed” by a judge could have a chilling effect on commenters — especially those with a compelling personal or professional motivation to stay in the shadows. But let’s keep perspective. As the Spokesman-Review’s own Shawn Vestal argues in a terrific July 12 column, the comment boards have become little more than “a sewer of stupidity and insults and shallowness. ...

“The idea that the newspaper has to spend time and treasure defending this nonsense — not protecting a whistleblower, not battling the government for access to public records — is repulsive.”

Bingo.

And there is your other, perhaps more salient chilling effect. This legal mess could conceivably happen to any newspaper that allows anonymous comments — including the Statesman. No matter how a newspaper tries to monitor its comment sections, there exists some element of legal exposure.

Is the risk worth the reward, the bump in online page views?

Since a coarse online shouting match does not enhance a newspaper’s brand as a leader of constructive community discussion, when does this circus become more headache than it is worth?

I know this much, from personal experience.

I do read comments at my blog, and try to weed out the off-topic posts and personal attacks, but I respond sparingly. If a commenter raises a good, on-point question, I’ll try to respond — and if a commenter makes a factual assertion I know to be false, I’ll try to set the record straight.

But my most constructive, transparent dialogues with readers generally take place on Facebook or Twitter, where people are less likely to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. I’ll go where a good conversation is taking place, and, yes, I wish it occurred more often at IdahoStatesman.com.

If Luster’s ruling prods newspapers to rethink commenting, that might prove to be a blessing in disguise.

A VANDERSLOOT VENDETTA?

Frank VanderSloot — the CEO of Melaleuca in Idaho Falls and seven-digit Mitt Romney campaign donor — is feeling a bit picked on these days. Were I in his shoes, I’d probably feel likewise.

In the past two months, VanderSloot has found himself the subject of IRS and Labor Department audits. This comes two months after a Barack Obama re-election campaign website assailed VanderSloot as “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

Asked about the audits by The Associated Press, VanderSloot had this to say: “I am not claiming there is a connection and I don’t know that there is one. But the fact that it comes right on the heels of being named on the president’s enemies list is curious to say the least.”

The IRS tells the AP that its audits are based solely on tax law, while Labor says its audits are usually random. So, as usual, it is far easier to suggest a conspiracy than to prove one. Based on VanderSloot’s account, “curious” is a fair description.

Make no mistake. I’ve been no fan of VanderSloot and his free-spending and heavy-handed political activism. When he groused this spring about the backlash from the Obama website, the longtime political power player sounded overly defensive and laughably naive. But there is a difference between fair-game criticism and the — yes, unprovable — possibility of administrative harassment.

COMMENT IN 140 (OR LESS)

The England trip could have gone worse. Romney also could have said he never quite “got” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Kevin Richert: 377-6437, Twitter: @KevinRichert