This paper deals with an Austrian case study on racist discourse strategies in the forums of the Austrian online newspaper derStandard.at. First, it considers forums as a communicative form characterised by specific linguistic features as well as its technical and functional design. Furthermore, it presents an analysis of the reader’s postings from a critical-discursive perspective following the discourse-historical approach, where the readers’ comments on articles on migration and language are investigated against the background of online-specific communication. Another subject of discussion will be areas of conflict between freedom of expression, deliberation and the ‘censorship’ of the forums by the editorial staff with the help of semi-automated tools for filtering out explicit racist postings. Finally, the paper discusses chances and risks of the investigated forums regarding discursive and social practices within democratically constituted societies and address the question which actions can be taken to improve the quality of such forums.