The continuing growth of WashingtonWatch.com has necessitated some improvements to our comment system. I’ll tell you about them here.

But first, if you want to lock in the name you’ll use on your comments, register here, making the name you use for comments your user name. (User names can’t have spaces – sorry about that. And sometimes the account confirmation email gets lost in the Internets somewhere. If you don’t get a confirmation email promptly, send us a note using the contact form at the bottom of every page and we’ll confirm you manually.)

This round of changes started when we had so many comments on a bill that visits to that page were starting to slow down the whole site.

Our practice had been to display all the comments on a single page, which meant we were serving too much data when the comments started to number in the thousands.

So we took that bill down, and now paginate comments when there gets to be a high number of them (80 or more). They’re still ordered top to bottom – oldest to newest, so the most recent comments will be on the last page. (That one bill is back up again, by the way. Have fun with it!)

We do encourage comments, and try to run this site in a way that makes participation and free speech easy. You’ve never had to register or log in to comment, and you still won’t.

One problem that has arisen, though, is when people “spoof” other people’s names in a thread. That’s just confusing, and it sure doesn’t help educate other visitors about the merits or demerits of a bill. (Neither does name-calling – or responding to name-calling!) So one of our new changes allows people to register a name so others can’t use it. Its owner, of course, must log in to use it. (Register here.)

Even when you’re logged in, though, you don’t have to use your name if you don’t want to. It’s just pre-populated in the comment form. If you want to take it out and comment anonymously (or “pseudonymously”), you can do that. You just won’t have the credibility with others that you have as a logged-in user that they’ve seen before. Of course, logged in or not, you can’t use a handle that someone else has reserved.

(When you are logged in, btw, you don’t have to fill in that annoying “CAPTCHA” form with the black and grey letters overlapping each other. That’s worth the price of admission right there!)

To give you a sense of whether you’re dealing with a stable identity on our site, logged-in users’ names will appear in an attractive light blue, while non-logged-in users’ names will appear in the blue-black we use for regular text. (Same with logged-in users who are not using their regular name.)

Again, we want to keep it easy to comment, but we think optional registration will solve a little problem with bad behavior, and it will help people develop reputations for honesty, fairness, and depth of knowledge. If you do the right thing using a fixed name, people will recognize that and appreciate you.

Now, to the content of comments: We almost never take comments down, even when people say some really awful things. But sometimes comments cross one of a few lines. Really foul language is not OK here. Nor are advertisements, violations of copyright, and other violations of rights. So we have created a little “report abuse” function that allows you to report others’ bad behavior.

Don’t abuse it! Figure out for yourself how to deal with disagreements and impolite people. We’re not your parents, the teacher, or Miss Manners. But when someone is excessively foul-mouthed, or when they are advertising stuff that is not relevant to the bill on that page, we’d like to hear about it. Don’t expect much – we might edit comments (and we intend to be transparent about it) – but we’re certainly not going to come down on “your side” of a fight or a policy issue.

Among other changes, we’ve added a date and time field to the comment display so you can see how current conversations are. We’ve gotten rid of “trackbacks,” which were mostly clutter and which were definitely an invitation to spammers. And we’ve created a “From the Blog” section so that you can see when a bill has been discussed on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.

Now, it’s pretty unlikely that we did this all perfectly. If you have any trouble, or if you have suggestions, let us know using the “contact” link below. There’s no guarantee that we can fix everything, or do it right away, but we always welcome constructive criticism. (Less so the other kind.)

We hope these changes to the comment system improve your experience of our site. Thanks for using WashingtonWatch.com. And if you read this whole post just now – thanks for that too!