A: The Daily Times constantly seeks the best ways to interact with our community and allow our readers to benefit from the life experience and wisdom of other readers. After using our previous system, Topix, for a number of years, we found that the use of anonymous pseudonyms gave rise to a large number of hateful, bigoted and/or libelous comments. We received a number of complaints (and petitions) from people in all facets of the community asking that something be done.
With our new system, people will be forced (to a certain extent) to put their names alongside their opinions. Logging in with a Facebook, Twitter or Google account will, we hope, give people pause before hitting "submit comment" on something mean or hateful.
Additionally, the new system has several benefits to aid conversation. Threaded comments (making it easier to participate in/follow a discussion), sorting abilities and advanced moderating tools for us should help keep the comments clean, civil and useful.
Q: What do I need in order to comment?
A: You can use your existing Twitter, Facebook or Google account, or create a new one. Details on how to create them can be found at the respective sites.
Q: Does this mean you'll have my Facebook login information? I don't want you looking at my cat pictures!
A: The beauty of the Disqus login system is that you're actually just logging into the individual site, not The Daily Times. So, if you're using your Twitter handle, you're logging into Twitter and Twitter is letting us know who you are. We never see your password or any of your account information beyond your username when you actually comment.
Q: Those are very good points, and you're quite attractive. But I liked Topix, so can I still access it?
A: Absolutely. We used Topix as a vendor for commenting on our articles, but the main Farmington Topix forum will still be accessible and, one assumes, lively. You can access it at http://www.topix.net.
And you're not so bad looking, yourself.
Q: Apparently I've been prohibited from commenting, but I didn't do anything wrong. What gives?
A: Part of our new moderation system allows for more granular control over who's commenting. One such tool allows us to specify an IP address or range of IP addresses (basically, a string of numbers that identifies a connection point to the Internet) to ban. It's possible that if you're at work, home or somewhere public that some brigand got the entire IP address block banned.
If you run into this and think there's been a mistake, please let our online editor know (his contact info is below) so he can remedy it. If you're the one getting the IP addresses into trouble, stop doing whatever it is that's getting you banned.
Q: I have other, less frequently asked questions/comments/concerns.
A: That's not a question. But you can get ahold of our online editor via email at dherman@daily-times.com. If you notice something weird technically, please make sure to include your operating system (Windows 98, Mac OS 10.4, etc.) and browser (Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 4, and so on). He keeps strange hours, so don't be surprised if you get a response at an odd time.
