Here’s a First Look at Our New Comments System

You can now create accounts and begin testing the platform.

Mother Jones illustration

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate