We know that you, valued reader, come to our sites primarily to read the news; we also know that many of you enjoy seeing what other people think about the news.
We like to see you engaging in positive debate about the city centre, seafront, council services, national politics and sport, with Brighton’s new season about to start.
If you’re one of those people who heads straight to the comments section, then you’ll be happy to hear that our new commenting platform comes with a host of new features, the most significant of which is the introduction of moderation.
- We’ll be using software to help in the moderation process; comments that are insulting, abusive, bigoted, obscene or threatening will be automatically blocked.
- A team of human moderators will continuously monitor comments and ensure that anything that slips through the software net is dealt with appropriately.
- We’ll continue to uphold our community rules, which you can read here; these haven’t changed but will now be enforced more proactively.
- We have better tools to deal with people who break the rules.
- Individual readers can hide comments and block other commenters from their personal view.
- The best comments will be highlighted, so you can easily find the most interesting ones.
- You’ll be able to follow people and stories that interest you and get alerts when new comments are posted.
- Subscribers and newsroom staff will be highlighted in the comments with badges.
We’ve done all this by partnering with Viafoura, an industry-leading website comments platform.
Our primary goal is to encourage more meaningful, insightful and interesting conversation, both between readers and with our own journalists in the newsroom.
To that end, we’re launching a four-week commenting competition, starting today, July 31, 2025.
Each week, one winner will be selected based on the quality of their comment.
The winning comments will be chosen by our editorial team, based on clarity, relevance, and overall contribution to the discussion.
Each weekly winner will receive a £20 Amazon voucher, and their comment will be featured in the winners’ section on the competition homepage.
We value your feedback, and of course it’s easy for you to let us know what you think by joining us in the comments on this article. We’ll see you there!
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