sBack in May we noted that “our article comments have been a cesspool of trolls and spam for years” in announcing that we were switching from Disqus comments to a system called Civil Comments.
Then a couple of weeks ago we had to report that Civil was shutting down and, due to the relative suddenness of their decision and the time it takes to choose, implement, test, approve, etc., a replacement, comments would be unavailable for a little while.
Today we are pleased to announce that they have returned.
The new system, powered by Spot.IM, has a lot of the things we liked about Civil and improvements in some of the areas Civil fell short.
At the bottom of any article you can create a new commenting account with your Facebook, Twitter or Google account, or with an email address and password. You can even log in with your Disqus account (look for a grey text link at the bottom right corner of the commenting area of the page).
If you had a Disqus account using the same email address, you should be able to claim your comments once you’ve created a Spot.IM account, and we believe the same will be true for Civil accounts with the same email address.
One feature that goes beyond commenting is the Newsfeed, which gives you slick list of stories with recent comments or lively discussion you can get to from any article. It’s a great way to not only see what people are talking about, but to discover new stuff from The Denver Post.
The Spot.IM team has worked with us to import comments from Civil and Disqus, so we should have all 10 years’ worth of article comments attached again.
A little on how it works
Settings for your account are accessible from the dropdown menu at the top right of the commenting area, and allow you to edit your profile, change your password, set notification preferences (you can get emails when people reply to you, for example), hide discussions and so on.
The dropdown menu at the upper-right corner of your comment will allow you to edit or delete it, and the same dropdown menu on other people’s comments will allow you report them.
Comments that include links will need to be approved, so they may not appear right away. This is intended to help reduce spam, so don’t resubmit the same comment with a link repeatedly.
Sometimes we may opt to disable comments for certain stories. We will usually only do this if a story is on a particularly divisive topic and the discussion has already turned very ugly, or when the thread is hijacked (all the comments are irrelevant to the story itself).
So as we reopen this means of communication with our staff and the community at large, make sure you read our Ground Rules to refamiliarize yourself with what moderators are watching for and join in the conversation.
