We are glad to be able to announce that portal interactions are back! We had to switch off comments some time back (and lost all old ones), as we got spammed by it. Now that we have profiles under control, we can switch interactivity on again. There are some new ways for users to interact with what they see on the portal and with each other as well.
Interactivity is a feature of the portal that we would like to expand in the future. If you have ideas, please tell us.
How to do Comments
Comments are allowed only for portal pages of the "article" type and for users with personal profiles (pseudonymous or not). They are done by writing some text at the bottom of the article or, if they are a reply to another comment, under the previous comment.
If you are logged in with a personal profile, you can leave comments on article pages. Comments are for short, personal remarks, stuff like "I really like this", "You forgot ...", "But please consider...", not for substantial replies. For such replies, rejoinders, commentaries and criticisms, we have the "reply-to" button which creates a new article and arranges them ("target" and "response") into threads.
Pseudonymous Comments
Subject to the general conditions on the use of pseudonymous profiles, it is possible (even welcome) to post comments under a pseudonym.
How to Rate an Article
On an article page, you'll see six stars at the start of the side-column. By clicking on one of them, you can rate the article, from 1 (lowest) to 6 stars (highest). Quite obviously (it's a philosophy portal after all), the purpose of rating is not expressing agreement or disagreement.
The stars you give instead reflect your judgment about the quality of the article. We judge this by mostly two factors:
- how "substantial" an article is, thought-provoking, "deep", presenting well and clearly a point of view that is worth taking seriously and advances our thinking on a topic;
- how "interesting" an article is, how agreable to read, how refreshing and revealing its means of expression are, how much light they shed on what they try to describe or explain.
Please take the rating seriously. We will pay attention to it, also with respect to our choice of which articles to put forward (mention on landing pages, newsletters etc.), and will sometimes even determine the winner(s) of some essay competition by the average stars they have received.
You can rate each article only once and (at least at the moment) it is not possible to change a rating once you've done it.