Since we upgraded to our new website system in June, commenting has been absent from iowastatedaily.net. We’ve heard from several of you, who are concerned that a vital part of our website has been missing.

I couldn’t agree with you more. A lot of discussion has taken place around the Daily’s office about how best to move forward with commenting. We talked for a long time about removing the anonymity of from our commenting system. Several of these talks involved our website provider to make sure our plans were compatable with their system.

The talks with our service provider have been the major holdup. Their current system did not support our desire to remove anonymity, but we have worked with them to find a solution.

They are now developing some new functions to incorporate into their next system upgrade. We are hoping to be able to test and set things up on our end in the next two to three weeks and to launch commenting by the end of the month.

If the timeline changes, I will write update posts. If you have questions about the future of commenting, opinions on anonymity or any issue relating to the Daily’s website, please contact me. My e-mail is [email protected].