Comments
General

Ch-ch-changes

An all-new commenting system is coming to Macleans.ca
By Philippe Gohier

We’re a restless bunch over here at Macleans.ca. To prove it, we’ve been working on some tweaks here and there, the most noticeable of which will go live today.

Some time in the next few hours, we’ll be switching our comment system over to Disqus. What that means for you, dear reader/commenter, is mainly three things:

(1) Most of the old comments have been imported (the really old ones are coming soon), but your IntenseDebate profiles will not be transferred over to the new system. So all those reputation points you’ve been collecting/squandering over the years will be gone for good. Sorry; we just couldn’t make it happen.

(2) From now on, you’ll have to register before you can comment on articles. You don’t necessarily have to register with Disqus—you can also log in with Twitter or Facebook—but the days of completely anonymous guest comments are over.

(3) Comments will now be relegated to a separate page. You’ll have to click a link at the bottom of an article to see the comments attached to it. The good news is that this should improve load times quite a bit for articles that have a ton of comments.

This is all part of a broader effort to give the site a bit of a spring cleaning, so you’ll be seeing some other, more subtle, changes as well. And since there’s no such thing as a bug-free website, you may notice some glitches as we work out the kinks. Please be patient with us as we sort everything out. In the meantime, feel free to add your comments and suggestions to this post. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Hope y’all like what we’ve got in store.