News

This weekend LifeSiteNews.com launched a vastly more powerful and feature-rich commenting system.

We know that sudden changes can always be a bit jarring, especially for those of you who don’t spend every waking hour on the internet like us, so we’ve prepared an easy guide to help you adjust to the new system.

The 3 most important things you need to know:

1) Toss your old username and password – You can now log in to comment on LifeSiteNews.com articles using your account with any of the most popular social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Open ID, and Disqus.

If you don’t have an account with any of these services, it’s easy as pie to sign up for an account with “Disqus” (the service we are using for our commenting system), which will allow you to comment on all of our stories. Simply click “login” at the bottom of one of our stories, and then select “register a new Disqus account,” and follow the instructions.

2) Help us moderate by “flagging” inappropriate comments – One of the most daunting tasks of managing a website like ours that welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, is making sure that commenting remains constructive and respectful. With our old system it was time-consuming to find and remove spam, or abusive or unconstructive comments. Now, however, our readers can help us with this task by hovering over an inappropriate comment and clicking the “flag” to alert us to review the comment.

3) “Reply” to previous comments – Now you can choose to “reply” to specific comments. When you hit “reply,” your comment will be indented under the comment that you are replying to, creating a “threaded” conversation. Threaded conversations make it much easier to wade through the comments beneath a story to find those you are most interested in. You can even “collapse” certain threaded conversations if you don’t want to see them.

Other features of the new system include the ability to “like” comments that you think stand out among the crowd, and the ability to sort comments by date and popularity.

LifeSiteNews Commenting Guidelines

The purpose of LifeSiteNews commenting is to allow readers to submit thoughtful, useful, well written new information or comments that complement the particular stories concerned.

Comments that meet this criteria are welcome.  We emphasize that very specific purpose for the LifeSiteNews commenting feature.

Dos and Don’ts

1) Be respectful – No name-calling, vulgarity or personal attacks and harassment. Such comments will be immediately removed with the commenters’ accounts suspended.

This applies equally to both sides of the issues we cover: both those who presume to have the authority to decide who is or isn’t, or should or shouldn’t be, in hell, and those who label anyone who disagrees with their socially liberal viewpoint a “fascist” or a “homophobe.”

2) Stick to the point/no lengthy debates, personal disputes – Comments wandering far from the topic of the article and/or involved in lengthy personal debates with one or two other commenters, will all be deleted.

On-going, lengthy disputes about theological minutiae or the differences between or within different Christian sects, or similar matters undermine the value and credibility of the commenting feature offered by LifeSiteNews.

While constructive, well reasoned debate directly related to LSN articles is appropriate, keep in mind that LSN isn’t a personal debating forum. What often become heated, personal debates are usually of extremely limited interest or usefulness to others than the two or three main participants. Those types of debates will be removed.

3) LifeSiteNews commenting is not a forum for pro-abortion or pro-homosexual propagandists – LifeSiteNews is an alternative news and information service intended to balance the extreme media bias on life, family and related issues in most other media. With that in mind, priority is given in our comments service to those who hold views relatively supportive of a genuine culture of life, but who may or may not agree with the contents of every story.

Although abortion and homosexual right supporters, among others who disagree with our positions, are still welcome to comment, such comments must be respectful and thoughtfully and reasonably presented. Those who attempt to dominate discussion with harsh, ideological and demeaning comments will have their comments removed and their accounts deleted.

4) Submit new information/story corrections – More than anything, what is sought from commenters is additional information that our journalists may not have been able to discover.

Also, new information that exposes a deficiency in our reporting is always much appreciated, as long as it is valid. We don’t at all mind corrections and, in fact, appreciate when you tell us about possible errors.

This is the wonder of the internet: that ordinary citizens are able to give their input, adding to the value and completeness of information about a particular issue.

At the same time, any disagreements that you might have with LSN or our authors, or the persons within our stories for that matter,  should always be expressed calmly and respectfully. That is a basic rule of effective communications.

5) LifeSiteNews is not a religious news service – While we approach matters from a solid Christian perspective, LifeSiteNews is a non-denominational news service dedicated to presenting the truth on life, family and related culture issues to a wide audience of all faiths and no faiths. Comments made with the assumption that all LifeSiteNews readers are Catholic or even Christian are frequently not appropriate and violate the comment rule of submitting comments directly related to the story.

Although the majority of our staff are Catholics, not all LSN staff are Catholic. We cover many Catholic related stories with the understanding that this largest Christian denomination is crucial to the restoration of a culture of life. Therefore, we emphasize reporting of hopeful trends and praiseworthy actions of leaders within the Church, while also exposing serious problems that weaken the much-needed influence of authentic Catholicism on life and family.

LifeSiteNews also attempts to report on positive developments and relevant negative developments within other Christian denominations and religions in order to strengthen authentic Judeo/Christian culture without which we do not believe a Culture of Life can be restored.

6) Also let us know when we’ve done something right – Human nature being what it is, people are more likely to comment when they disagree with something than when they approve of it. However, affirmative comments not only cheer up our staff (a truly noble goal, if we might say so ourselves!), but they raise the general tenor of the comments, setting the groundwork for positive and constructive conversations that are truly illuminating.

As well, affirmative comments let us know the types of stories our readers appreciate, so we can focus our energies more effectively.

If everyone follows these rules, we believe that LifeSiteNews can continue to be the world’s leading community of pro-life and pro-family activists, and for constructive conversation about the most important issues facing the world today.