Improving Comments, Discussions

We’ve launched a new comment system designed to foster more active, insightful, and civil discussions among Post readers, reporters, and editors. Now we need your ideas to make it better.

We remain committed to open discussions about Post coverage, politics, Washington area news and trends, and whatever topics are of interest to you. Anyone who registers as a Post user, or logs into the site via Facebook Connect, can continue to comment in the new system and contribute to post user photo galleries and Discussion Groups.

Readers who’ve earned one of our new user badges, however, will see their comments and discussion posts in new, prominent “Top Comment” and “Top Post” threads.

You can reply directly to what others have said instead of having to post both replies and new comments in crowded “single thread” discussions. You can sort comments from latest to earliest (the default view) or from earliest to latest. New posts appear automatically, without requiring you to reload pages.

Commenters remain responsible for what they post. Moderators will continue to remove posts that include profanity, hate speech, or personal attacks or that otherwise violate our Discussion Guidelines. But we’ve started to pre-screen posts from new commenters before publishing them to verify that they meet the site Guidelines.

Taken together, we think these new features and practices will help improve the quality of Post conversations and debates, and make them more useful to you. But we don’t expect to get everything right at launch. So please tell us what you think of the changes, and what you’d change, by posting to this discussion. — Hal Straus, Interactivity Editor