How to Discourse: Taking Part in Discussions
Once you’ve created an account, you can engage in conversation several ways.
First, you’ll find a link to the conversation at the bottom of every article. It’ll feature the first few comments, and give you links to join in if you wish.
Second, you can engage in conversation directly at Spectrum Conversation. Each article and blog post on Spectrum has a corresponding conversation. You can explore these by clicking around Spectrum Conversation. As you read comment threads, you can respond directly on those. To do so, you use the `Reply` button. You can reply to an article by clicking the Reply below the excerpt, or to a specific post by another commenter by clicking Reply next to that comment.
At the bottom of every post, you’re also given a few more options to interact with the comment. The Heart button will like the comment. It’s the equivalent of the ‘Thumbs Up’ from our previous system. You can get a link that will lead directly to the comment by clicking the chain icon. You can Flag the comment as against our commenting policy by clicking the flag. This will notify the administrators of this comment. (Note: liking and flags are activated for your account only once you’ve read and responded to a few articles.) Finally, you can bookmark this comment if you want to able to come to it later.
At the top of all the comments, and below the excerpted article is an information bar that gives you an overview of the conversation at large: who the most engaged commenters have been, how many likes have comments received, where to read the article on the Spectrum site, etc.
