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DISQUS Help Videos

How to Sign Up for DISQUS on Spectrum

How to change your DISQUS Profile on Spectrum

Taking Ownership of Old Comments

For those who have commented on our site in the past, you can merge your old comments into your new DISQUS profile. If you sign up to DISQUS with the same email address you used to post comments on the old system, you will be able to do this. You can read about how on the DISQUS help page.

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UPDATE 2: Thanks for your patience. Our DISQUS comments are now live! There are still a few more things we need to get working, including the ‘Recent Comments’ right sidebar and the number of comments indicator next to individual posts. I hope to have all of that working later today.

UPDATE: We encountered a few errors with our import, and the process is taking a little longer than anticipated. We will have the comments back up and running mid-week.

Spectrum’s conversation is growing up. Sunday, May 20th, we will be moving to a new commenting system.

The Spectrum community has produced over 180,000 comments in the past four years. When we moved to our current platform in 2008 we could not have expected how many important conversations would take place in this digital space.

We’ve had our growing pains, trying to encourage the kind of dialogue that is productive rather than destructive. And as the conversations grew larger–it’s not uncommon for an article to have over 100 comments–we’ve come to realize that we’ve outgrown our current system.

Robert Jacobson was kind enough to help fill this gap with his UltraViolet browser plugin, which added a few badly needed features to our comments. This allowed us a bit more time to assess how best to move forward. We are now ready for the next step.

We will be moving to the DISQUS commenting platform beginning Sunday, May 20th. The transition will start by no longer allowing people to comment on our current system. You will still see all comments, but you will not be able to post new ones. During this time, we will import all old comments into DISQUS, which will take about 24 hours. If all goes well, we will finally take down the old comment system and turn on DISQUS. All your old comments will be there.

How will DISQUS work?

Many of you will already have encountered DISQUS comments. Very large sites such as Engadget use DISQUS, as well as other smaller sites in the Adventist blogosphere. Its basic functions will be very similar to those of our current system, but there will be several notable changes.

1. All users will be required to provide a verifiable identity.

For the past few years we’ve allowed people to comment without a verified email address. This will change with DISQUS. We will require that all people use a verifiable email, or other identification, such as a Facebook or Twitter account, to comment. You will still be allowed to maintain your privacy by using a pseudonym, but this verifiable ID will allow us to better moderate the conversation. Anybody with accounts on our current system will have to create a new one on DISQUS. You can create an account now here.

2. We will introduce nested conversations.

For the past four years our comments have been ‘flat’ in that they only order themselves chronologically. With DISQUS, we will allow you to directly respond to other comments, allowing nicely nested conversations. Hopefully this can both encourage a diversity of conversation as well as making it easier to follow the conversations you are taking part in.

3. We will be introducing a new comment policy.

In an effort to make our community a more respectful and enriching experience, the Spectrum Web Team has created a Spectrum Commenters Covenant that outlines each of our responsibilities as participants in this online forum. All future editorial decisions on comments will be based on this policy.

4. The community will help shape the conversation.

In light of the Spectrum Community Covenant, we hope that all of you will help us in raising the level of discourse on the site. DISQUS will provide some tools that will help in this. You will be able to vote up a comment as well as flag comments. By up-voting comments we hope that we will be able to raise the best comments to the top. DISQUS will even allow you to order comments based on the number of positive votes it has received. Spam and comments that break the community covanent can be flagged by users. This will bring these comments to our attention so we can deal with them appropriately.

Thank you for making Spectrum the community of conversation.

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