As we announced recently, Mother Jones is working on creating a better commenting experience. We want to create a space for productive and respectful discourse for readers, and as part of this project, we have written new community guidelines and will switch to the latest version of the Coral commenting platform. With its roots in Mozilla and the open source community, Coral is designed to be a more ethical, discussion-centered platform built around best practices of privacy and community building.
We’re excited to be the very first publisher to offer the new version of Coral, which means your feedback will directly help shape its future, with new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months. For more information on our move to Coral you can see our initial test of the system, where many commenters gave helpful feedback that we’ve shared with the Coral team. Since that first test, the following changes have been made:
- Our moderators can now feature particularly insightful comments. There is an option at the top of the comment section to view featured comments, which we hope will offer entry points into the conversation.
- We have changed the amount of time you have to edit your comment from 1 minute to 5 minutes.
- We have changed the character limit in a comment from 1,500 to 2,000.
- There have been numerous bug fixes thanks in part to the feedback from all of you who helped us test!
Please help us continue to test the new system by creating an account and leaving a comment in the section below. (The account you create now will be the same you use once we launch site-wide.) You can also email us about the new comment system at comments@motherjones.com.
We hope you’ll let us know what you think!