Here’s a First Look at Our New Comments System

You can now create accounts and begin testing the platform.

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As we announced earlier this month, Mother Jones is working on creating a better commenting experience. We are doing this because we want to create a space for respectful and productive discourse for our readers. As part of this project, we have created new community guidelines (now available here) and will switch to the newest 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 commenting platform, built around best practices of privacy and community design.

We’re beginning to test how the platform works on our site—and we need your help. Coral is now live on this post (and this post only). You can create an account using your email address and start using the platform in the comments below. (Note: The account you create now will be the same one you use once we launch site-wide.) We hope you’ll let us know what you think! 

Here are some of the features you’ll be able to use on Coral. You can:

  • “Respect” a comment, rather than upvoting or downvoting a comment.
  • Choose to “ignore” other commenters. This means their comments will no longer be visible to you; however, it does not inform them or ban them from the site. (Only our moderation team can ban people, which we will only do if someone is frequently or deliberately violating our guidelines.)
  • Report a comment and explain to moderators why you believe a comment violated our community guidelines.
  • Choose to view comments by “newest first,” “oldest first,” “most replies,” or “most respected.”
  • Share links to a discussion thread.
  • See when another user joined.
  • See when comments are “featured” at the top of the comment stream.

Unlike many other comment platforms, Coral does not contain any marketing-based trackers or ads. This means it does not track you across the web, sell your browsing data, or target ads at you.

Our community’s data remains separate from the data of any other publishers using their platform, and Coral never shares or sells any of it to anyone. This means commenters on the site are here because they read Mother Jones articles. They can’t go to any other webpage to comment, and notifications are only set within our community. We expect this will improve the quality of the conversation and stop trolls on other sites from randomly participating.

Coral also contains an experimental anti-abuse filter. If the system thinks the language in your comment is abusive (not just swear words—we still allow those), it will give you an opportunity to change the comment before you submit it.

We are excited to be the very first publisher to offer the new version of Coral, which means your feedback will be directly used to shape its future, with new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months. Please let us know what you think, and both we and the Coral team will be listening. Leave a comment below or email comments@motherjones.com.

Thank you to those who have already shared feedback in the comments section and through email. We’ve answered them in the FAQ section of our guidelines

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

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