Posted by Peter Carpenter, a resident of the Atherton: Lindenwood neighborhood, on Jan 25, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Peter Carpenter is a member (registered user) of Almanac Online

Here is the Washington Post's new policy:

"We've launched a new comment system designed to foster more insightful, active, and civil discussions among Post readers, reporters, and editors.

Anyone who registers as a Post user or logs in via Facebook Connect can still comment on staff-produced articles, videos, and photo galleries and contribute to user galleries and Discussion Groups on the site.

Users who've earned one of our new user badges, however, will see their views labeled prominently as "Top Comments" or "Top Posts".

The new system lets you reply directly to what others have said instead of having to post both replies and comments into crowded "single thread" discussions.

You can sort comments from latest to earliest (the default view) or from earliest to latest. And new posts appear automatically, without requiring you to reload pages.

Commenters remain responsible for what they post, and we continue to remove posts that include profanity, hate speech, or personal attacks or that otherwise violate our Discussion Guidelines.

However, we've started to review posts by new commenters before publishing them to verify that they meet the Guidelines.

The new comment system is part of an overall redesign of the Washington Post web site. We think it will improve the quality of Post conversations and debates, and make them more useful to you."