The vigorous community of commenters on Berkeleyside is, we believe, one of our strengths. It’s unsurprising that there are fiercely held opinions in Berkeley, but we’re happy that — for the most part — people find ways to express them civilly on Berkeleyside.
To improve our ability to moderate comments, and to provide a better format for discussions, we’ve switched to a new system for comments. We’re now using Disqus, a local company, to provide our comments platform.
What do our readers gain with Disqus?
We now offer threaded discussions. You can comment on a post, as before, or you can reply to a specific comment. That will be shown visually. You can also “like” a specific comment, or flag it for moderation if you think it violates our rules. You can choose to look at the comments on any post by oldest first (the default setting), newest first, or by “best rating”, which depends on readers liking comments.
Disqus also brings a new identity system to Berkeleyside’s comments. Commenters can sign in with their Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Google, Yahoo or Disqus identity. If you want to remain anonymous or pseudonymous you can do that, too, by posting as a guest with whatever name you wish to choose.
For commenters who do have a registered identity, readers will be able to click on their names and see previous comments they’ve written on Berkeleyside and other sites that use Disqus.
Let us know in the comments what you think of our new comments.
