Hello, humans. We’re thrilled to welcome you all to The Verge’s most significant relaunch ever. You’ll notice a lot has changed, and that includes our commenting system!

We’re proud to relaunch Verge comments on the Coral platform: a powerful tool for building communities and great commenting experiences. If you’re a commenter on Polygon or SB Nation, you’ve already seen Coral in action. We’re really thankful to our friends on the Coral team for working with us to make a great commenting system for The Verge.

We think about comments a lot. They’ve been an important part of The Verge from day one, and we’re thankful to our loyal community, which continues to participate across the site in funny, surprising, and insightful ways. We know Coral will help us make comments at The Verge even better. The system’s tools will help you, Verge staff, and our exceptional team of moderators improve discourse on the internet one comment at a time. 

Of course, this is just day one of our relaunch. Our vision for the site, the commenting system, and our overall community are much bigger than what you see here today. From live events to merch and new surprises, we’re thinking a lot about how to bring The Verge into the world in new ways. We’ll have a lot more to say about all of this as the site continues to grow and evolve.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. You probably want to know what the new toy does!

Here are some of the new things you can do in new Verge comments right now: 

• New commenting view. When you click to go to the comments on an article, the comment experience now slides out from the side of your screen on desktop or takes over the entire window on mobile. (Fancy!) This will let everyone focus a little more on conversations without having to scroll or jump to the bottom of the article. Plus, it just looks neat.
• Featured comments. Both moderators and our editorial team at The Verge will be way more involved in surfacing and featuring the best comments across the site. You’ll start to see that comments that we think are the best of the best — maybe because they’re hilarious, smart, or unique — will become the first comments you see on our stories.
• Embeds. You can now easily drop stuff like tweets and YouTube videos in posts. And we’re launching with access to a GIF library from inside the comment editor.
• Sorting. Phew. You can now sort comments by newest, oldest, most recommended, or most active.
• Muting. If you’re tired of another user and don’t want to see their comments, you can mute them. Just click on their username on any comment and select the “Ignore” button.
• Better reporting. Coral comes with some enhanced reporting tools that will help you and us identify comments that violate our Community Guidelines.

If you have a comment history with The Verge, you’ll also notice that it’s missing. Don’t worry, that’s just temporary; your comments will be migrated to the new system soon. You can now access your comments via the My Profile tab inside the comments section of any article.

We’re excited to dive back into the comments and participate with readers. Places like Twitter and Facebook can be awfully noisy, and we’re still committed to making conversations on The Verge better than the fever swamps of the internet. So we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect how we think about the comments: as a place to be fun, interesting, and respectful.

Yes, we still have some hard and fast rules, but our guidelines now start with statements we hope everyone will actively think about while participating. I want to thank The Verge’s chief of moderation Eric Berggren both for caring so much about this community and helping to develop the new guidelines.

Be respectful. Being respectful in the commenting community is about more than just following the rules or being polite; it’s about trying to encourage good conversation by welcoming and including others. Think about how your words and actions might affect others. Better yet: think about how you can help make everyone want to jump in.

Be curious. The Verge is about exploring our future together. Show up to the comments with the same spirit of curiosity we bring to writing posts for the site; it’s fun to learn, and we can help each other learn new and interesting things together. Remember that people come from all different places and backgrounds, so don’t assume you know what they think, feel, or mean.

Be interesting. Another way of putting it: be relevant. Try to bring something new or unique to the conversation. This isn’t a race to be the first, the loudest, or the edgiest. We hope you’ll share cool stuff with the community, especially if that means sharing an insight that only you can provide. And remember to stay on topic; comments are not a free-for-all, and you’re more likely to write a great comment if it’s related to the topic at hand. Try to add value to each thread you participate in instead of just replying for the sake of it.

Show your work. You can approach commenting the same way The Verge approaches blogging. Making an argument or a big claim? Back it up with something tangible that you can link to, whether it’s another news story, a scientific study, or a really good video explanation. Conversations are richer and more interesting when people share some of the sources for their assumptions and conclusions. And you might even tip us on something we should consider in our coverage.

Help us out. Our moderators work hard every day to help make sure The Verge is a place where everyone feels welcome. You can help us by reporting comments that violate the rules, like spam, personal attacks, or creepy comments. (See the full Community Guidelines for an exhaustive list of Bad Things.) Put simply, don’t be a jerk to other people on The Verge. And if you see someone doing rude stuff in the comments, let us know.

We’re excited to keep working with the Coral team to build more for Verge comments, and you’ll see new cool stuff added over time, like live Q&As. But new comments are just the beginning of a bunch of experiments from The Verge. We’re working on more live events, new merch, and some other top-secret projects.

See you in the comments!