We take great pride in our growing community of commenters at Inside the Hall. As many of you know, we use Disqus to power our discussion and our analytics tell us that 54% of you are using a Disqus account.
Our goal, however, is to drive that number much higher for a couple of reasons:
One of the challenges of a booming community is moderating comments. By default, if you make a comment as a guest, your comment must first be filtered through a moderator before it appears on the site. This is done primarily to prevent profanity and limit the trolls from infiltrating the site.
To address this, we’ve added two comment moderators: eph521 and Kelin Zeller. Both have graciously volunteered their time to assist us and for that we are thankful. You’ll notice a blue star by each of their names in the comments.
(It didn’t, for the record, take much to convince Kelin. He’s on the site more than any of us. Only kidding, Kelin.)
Beyond that, the best course of action is to encourage all of our commenters to get a Disqus Profile.
If you’re already commenting frequently without a Disqus Profile, you can find your existing comments using your email address and bring them into your new Disqus Profile. Easy enough, right?
You only need three things to sign up: A username, a valid email address and a password.
Once you’re registered, your comments will no longer require moderation, you’ll be able to customize an avatar that will appear with all of your posts, you’ll be able to track and subscribe to the comments of others and you’ll also have the ability to edit or delete your comments.
What are you waiting for?
We’ve had a few emails asking for better instructions on how to comment on the site, so we’ve written a short tutorial that we hope will help. Details after the jump.
As the Inside the Hall community continues to grow, it’s essential that we stay on top of moderation of comments. To this point, we’ve been fairly lenient on moderation of comments (and will continue to be), but there have been instances where we’ve had to step in. Effective immediately, you’ll be required to sign up for a username with Disqus in order to post comments. Those of you who are already registered will not be affected by this change. Those of you aren’t registered, head on over to Disqus and register. You’ll be asked to provide a valid email address and create a username and password. If you have any questions or run into problems during registration, please contact us at info@insidethehall.com.
Earlier this week, in our “Help us improve Inside the Hall” post, a good lot of you out there were clamoring for a message board or forum to get your Hoosier talk on. We’re still a bit hesitant to bust that out, so we think we’ve found the next best thing: a forum within the comments. This post — hopefully — will be the first one to have the new system called Disqus.
You’ll be able to respond to individual comments, make your own avatar and profile and rate other people’s comments. We’re excited about it. However, it’s largely an unknown beast to us, so we do apologize for any unforeseen mishaps. Take a peek around and see all it has to offer.
With that said: time to let it whirl. We’ll see how it goes and take it from there. Good luck out there, kids.
Sidenote: If you don’t want to register, you don’t have to. You can just keep posting comments as you always have.
