From today, we are introducing comment registration on HoldtheFrontPage. This means that in order to comment on stories in future, users will need to be logged into the site.
This change is in line with practice throughout most of the regional press industry and is designed to help encourage users who comment on HTFP to use our other services, including creating email job alerts, posting CVs and applying for jobs through the site.
If you already have your own jobseeker account, you simply need to login to that account in order to comment. For those who don’t have a current user account, you will need to create one here.
In addition, users will also be able to login using their Facebook, Twitter or Google profiles.
As well as helping to build more of a community around the site, we hope that this change will lead to an improvement in the overall quality of the comments threads.
We want to ensure that the overall tenor of the comments section more accurately reflects the balance of opinion within the industry, and to create a welcoming space where people can feel free to express a range of different views.
Although we want to encourage most users to comment under their own names, we recognise there are still occasions where users may need to comment anonymously.
You will still be able to do this by creating a posting name separate from your username, but you will not be able to change it once it has been created.
This will, for instance, prevent individual commenters from creating multiple identities in comments threads, then switching between them in order to give the impression there is support for their particular point of view.
It will also help us to guard against the legally questionable practice of people impersonating other users, or named individuals within the industry, and thereby attributing to them views they do not hold.
Despite the change, the same ‘house rules’ continue to apply, which I would summarise as: play the ball and not the man, avoid obscene or discriminatory language, and be mindful of the libel laws.
We are confident the vast majority of our users will welcome this change and that HTFP will continue to be a forum for informative and at times impassioned debate about the goings on in our great industry.
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I’ve got no objection to posting under my own name usually (unless I’m referring to my own experience in a sensitive area) but I suspect I’m known as GladImOutOfIt now, and no-one else is having that name, so there. Bit like Dick Minim (what ever has happened to him?)
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I’ve had an enforced absence, Hilary (or glad), but Gus Flair and Septimus Harding have been doing the honours lately. Look forward to reappearing if I can get the hang of this deuced technology.
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Sensible move, and although it may dissuade some of the more ad hoc commenters I hope those people will still take the effort to engage.
Without doing down HTFP’s excellent work, the comments add different perspectives and add further colour to the stories published.
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It’s a shame to preclude many who will not have an independent platform on which to comment ‘at work’ and who use HTFP to raise issues, comment and highlight the often jaundiced PR bull pumped out by their employers, many regional press groups including the one I am with don’t take kindly to anything other than agreement with the company line seeing anyone who has the audacity to disagree as ‘ not being on the bus’ so HTFP provides an effective and valued platform for views and comment which would otherwise go unheard, let’s hope the many genuine and informed individuals who used to post here continue to do so as without them the forums will become bland and of little value to those in the industry and those with points to raise.
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As I have said in the piece Kenny, it is still possible for people to create pseudonymous profiles for this purpose, just so long as they stick to the one.
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I do hope the old guard register. Love them or not, I’ve read some great comments. Thanks guys, gals and of course Dick M !
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Happy to sign up for this as it should clear the field of doppelgangers.
Prefer to stay anonymous though.
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Seems we have been having a few problems with the ‘commenter name’ aspect of the new functionality but this should be fixed now.
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A good move and one which will hopefully have the desired effect of deterring those “playing the system” whilst still making it possible for genuine views to still be aired as before, with the anonymity from the pseudonyms still enabling those still on the front line to comment without concern.
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Put our comments up then, Paul. GladImOutOfIt went under her own name on the new Trinity Mirror regional MD story, though you pulled it quickly enough. Let’s see what we’re all saying about TM’s latest awful figures.
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We can’t apply the fix retrospectively I’m afraid Dick, so if we publish those comments they will appear under your real names.
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Fair enough, Paul, then stay late tonight (I bet you did last night). Anyway, Kenny Kaye seems to suggest that publishing companies embodying the right of free speech, fearless investigation and robust comment within a democratic framework may not be quite so keen on these qualities when it comes to looking at themselves. Breathtaking cynicism, sir, perish those dark thoughts! But I agree it would be a damned shame if Jeff Jones, Harry Blackwood, that bloke from the W Midlands who always tries to rile Dick (no chance, Mick) and the other old stagers here were put off by the new arrangement. Hopefully not, and we can all continue to observe and chronicle the decline and fall of the dead-tree empire, and mock the nonsensical blathering of the corporate dinosaurs about how videos of cat-tree rescues will save the day. Onward!
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The problem of using the posters name will already have put people off, this is part of the reason why I feel fewer will post on HTFP in future, anonymity and freedom to comment or give the insiders view were a benefit,I’m sure already some commenters will have had their cards marked
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