The eagle-eyed among you will have already spotted that our comments pages have had a bit of a makeover – but the changes we’ve made are not just aesthetic.
We know that you, valued reader, come to our sites primarily to read the news; we also know that many of you enjoy seeing what other people think about the news.
If you’re one of those people who heads straight to the comment section, then you’ll be happy to hear that our new commenting platform comes with a host of new features, the most significant of which is the introduction of moderation.
- We’ll be using software to help in the moderation process; comments that are insulting, abusive, bigoted, obscene or threatening will be automatically blocked.
- A team of human moderators will continuously monitor comments and ensure that anything that slips through the software net is dealt with appropriately.
- We’ll continue to uphold our community rules, which you can read here; these haven’t changed but will now be enforced more proactively.
- We have better tools to deal with people who break the rules.
- Individual readers can hide comments and block other commenters from their personal view.
- The best comments will be highlighted, so you can easily find the most interesting ones.
- You’ll be able to follow people and stories that interest you and get alerts when new comments are posted.
- Subscribers and newsroom staff will be highlighted in the comments with badges.
We’ve done all this by partnering with Viafoura, an industry-leading website comments platform.
Editor Simon Murfitt said: “We love a lively comments section – the opinions and observations below our stories are part of the community’s conversation.
“They are a bit like readers’ letters pages, but with new entries minute by minute. We find out what our readers are thinking – and sometimes they can take the stories themselves in a different direction.
“An in an age of echo chambers, we should be able to see each others’ points of view and have our own ideas challenged. We all live in the same place, after all.
“But we’ve all seen what happens when a minority of people poison the debate by trading insults – it’s bad for all of us.
“We now have better moderation tools to keep debate polite and weed out the people who abuse the system – so readers can look below the line and join a conversation that’s lively and engaging.”
Our primary goal is to encourage more meaningful, insightful and interesting conversation, both between readers and with our own journalists in the newsroom.
We value your feedback, and of course it’s easy for you to let us know what you think by joining us in the comments on this article. We’ll see you there!
