We hear you loud and clear at The Globe and Mail. You want your commenting back and we are happy to announce it is once again up and running. We’ve made a few changes and we’d like to explain the motivation behind them.
First, we’ve moved from our previous vendor, Civil Comments, to work with the Coral Project team. Their commenting tool has been designed specifically with newsrooms in mind and is open source, giving us all an opportunity to contribute and learn.
We encourage you to look into The Coral Project’s efforts. They are currently partnering with a number of large newsrooms to help comment sections thrive. Their primary motivation, like ours, is to build a safe and easy-to-use commenting system.
Second, starting today we are limiting commenting to our subscribers. Our priority is to make commenting a valuable experience for our subscribers and we believe this new format will help us reduce the number of trolls across the site. In the past, we offered commenting to anyone who chose to register with us. After much research and analysis, we have come to understand that this approach left a door open for bad behaviour and is no longer safe or productive for our audience.
We understand that this will be difficult for registered users who previously enjoyed participating in our comment section. Non-subscribers can still read and sort comments, but they will no longer be able to write comments of their own or engage with the comments from other readers. If you would like to become a subscriber, you can do so here. Non-subscribers can still engage with Globe journalism on our Facebook page and via Twitter.
Our efforts to ensure a safe and hate-free community remain a priority. Globe editors will continue to facilitate discussion and moderate where they see issues. We also continue to employ the services of ICUC, a moderation service that helps our editors manage comments across the site. Their editors help us moderate and in some cases pre-moderate more sensitive stories to ensure the commentary is in line with our community guidelines.
Our community and commenting guidelines remain the same. We continue to reserve the right to close comments on articles for legal reasons and when the volume of abusive comments becomes unmanageable. We don’t believe there is a perfect system for commenting, which is why there are still real people working to improve these tools and the experience of our readers.
You can report issues and send feedback to feedback@globeandmail.com. You can still write to our Public Editor, Sylvia Stead, and we accept letters to the editor which can be sent to letters@globeandmail.com.
This is a new tool and we look forward to hearing your feedback as we continue to make improvements to the system and our internal processes. We ask for your patience as we learn.
It has been brought to our attention that a small number of subscribers receive an error when trying to post comments on The Globe’s new commenting platform. We are working to eliminate this problem, but in the meantime, most issues can be solved by logging out of globeandmail.com and logging back in. We’re working to make this platform better for you and we apologize for the inconvenience.
You can find our Frequently Asked Questions document related to our new commenting platform here.
Comments are back on globeandmail.comChoreograph