Brian Gable
We have a new commenting system on globeandmail.com., and we've heard from many readers who wanted to share their feedback on what they like and don't like.
We hope you are enjoying the new features, which include email notifications when someone replies to your comment, the ability to delete your comments and the ability to connect your Globe account to your social networks. We can also now premoderate articles on topics that attract offensive comments. We hope you find this improves the tone and level of debate on our site.
We value your feedback and have been working with our comment system provider to solve readers' concerns.
Here are a few features we are working on:
- Reinstating the number of thumbs up and thumbs down a comment receives, instead of just providing an overall score.
- Allowing users to click on an individual comment, and have it take them directly to the place in the thread of the article where it appears
This work takes time and we appreciate readers' understanding and patience. As with any new system, there are growing pains, but we feel that once the kinks are ironed out, readers will find the system is comparable (and even superior) to the previous one.
While our new system does not allow users to set their profiles to private, we found that very few commenters used this function in the previous system so there are no plans to reintroduce it.
We've also heard from readers who want to bring back the pagination of the comments pages. Unfortunately, this is not a feature our new system offers so we are not able to do so. However we are evaluating additional sorting features to provide more options for displaying comments. And to those readers who feel the text size is too small, you do have the option of zooming in to enlarge the text by holding down the ctrl key and pressing +.
Please continue to send your feedback to community@globeandmail.com.