One of the primary missions of CNYCentral.com has been to encourage people in our communities to talk to each other about the local news, politics, sports and other topics that impact us, our neighborhoods and our community.
Thanks to Facebook, starting these conversations online is now very simple. When you push the “Recommend” or “Share” buttons in our articles, you can instantly begin a discussion about our stories with friends on your Facebook wall.
Your Facebook shares and recommendations also help us figure out which stories are actually important to the community. We can then put those stories in front of more readers to encourage even more discussion.
Last week, we introduced yet another Facebook feature that we hope will boost community discourse: Facebook Comments.
Facebook Comments lets you add a comment to a story, reply to comments from others on CNYCentral.com and post your comments to your Facebook wall so that your friends can see them.
When friends reply to your wall post, their comments will also be added to the story's comment stream. And you'll get notifications when CNYCentral.com readers reply to your comments so that you can get back into the discussion.
These are just a few ways in which Facebook Comments gets our readers and community members talking to each other. Want to learn more about CNYCentral.com‘s Facebook Comments features? Check out the links to all the resources we’ve created for you below.
Letter: Commenting on CNYCentral.com via Facebook
Why are we changing to Facebook authentication for commenting?
We’ve changed the way you can comment on our stories at CNYCentral.com in a way that we believe will foster a more civil and pleasant online discussion than what you may have seen in the past.
In fact, we know that many of you have avoided commenting on our stories – not because you had nothing to say – because you were turned off by some of the off-topic and frankly vile comments left by anonymous users.
We heard you. We listened. And now we’re launching a change we believe will create a more positive online community connected with our website.
From Thursday forward, to leave a comment on our website, you will need to log in with an active Facebook account. No longer will commenting be anonymous.
This is an industry-wide trend, and there’s good reason for it.
- Commenting tends to be more civil and on-topic when users are leaving comments through their Facebook profiles.
- “Trolls” who like to make irrelevant comments, post SPAM and even make derogatory, racist or hateful comments will largely go away because to leave such a comment, their real name and face goes along with the comment.
- Facebook does a great job of identifying fake users and automatically blocks their comments from public view.
What if you don’t have a Facebook account? Maybe you’re worried about your personal privacy? We understand that this change may inconvenience a few of you, which is why we’ve created some additional resources to help you create a Facebook account you can feel comfortable with and use to comment on our site.
If you’re dead-set against creating a Facebook page, that is entirely up to you and we fully respect your decision. We hope you continue to enjoy using CNYCentral.com for all of the features, functionality and content you find useful, but regretfully, we will no longer be able to allow you to comment.
Having a Facebook account helps you be more engaged with our website not only with news, weather and sports but also with community events, contests and sharing content such as photos and video.
We hope you will embrace this change as a great move forward. We are!
