The Salt Lake Tribune will move next month to a new comments platform intended to improve and expand the conversations about our journalism.
The platform is built by Orem-based World Table, which has been developing interactive platforms for news websites for several years. It has enhanced tools for incentivizing productive comments and minimizing trolling.
At the heart of the platform is a scoring system. Users' scores are determined by their authenticity, and the quality and quantity of their comments. Other readers can grade comments negatively or positively. That, in turn, produces a running score for commenters. If their scores are high, their comments will appear higher. If their scores fall below a threshold, their comments will not display. For more information on World Table’s platform, you can check out a user guide at: https://www.worldtable.co/user-guide/.
The Tribune has had comments on all articles on sltrib.com for more than a decade. Letting readers have their say has been invaluable, but it has not been without problems. Like social media platforms and the internet as a whole, maintaining productive, civil conversations is a constant battle. We think World Table is a step in the right direction.
Still, we understand that online comments are not for everyone, so comments readers will continue to click through to another page to view them.
World Table comments will be available on all Tribune articles starting Oct. 1. For now, we have set up World Table comments only on this article so commenters can sign up and get familiar.
Once we’re fully live on the new platform, comments on old articles on our current Disqus platform will still be available through a link on the stories. But new articles only will have World Table comments.
Commenters will have to create accounts on the new platform. Current Tribune commenters can use their Disqus logins to create accounts, but their Disqus histories will not carry over.
So please jump in and use the new comments platform to tell us what you think of it. We know you will.