June 13, 2019

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. 

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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