Comments Are Back On

Read all the way through for an explanation of the site behavior that caused us to shut them down in the first place. Meanwhile, we'll do a deep dive on the results of our thoroughly unscientific sampling of reader opinion in the next regular Monday blog but for now opinion is split down the middle.

Enough readers have a caveat-loaded positive opinion about them staying and if we fulfill at least some of those caveats we'll win back some of the naysayers. So, we'll leave the comments on for all the stories in this edition and go back and turn them on for the ones that got missed. For now, the environment will stay the same as it has been, with spotty moderation and the occasional diatribe about being nice but there are new developments afoot that promise to make the experience better for all of us. Stay tuned.

Important Note: We paused the comments because in the process of migrating to a new content management system, the system started posting the email addresses of commenters instead of their display names. That risk remains. Some readers have gone into their accounts (click on "logged in as..." notation on the top menu bar) and found the display name box empty. Typing their chosen public persona name in again fixed it. Give that a try if it's important to you but it may not work. We will be addressing that issue but it will take some time and this will be the only warning about it.