WSJ is experimenting with its comments

The Wall Street Journal is testing a new commenting system using software developed in partnership with The Coral Project.

A story on its website states, “In the first phase of this test, we are offering comments using this software on a limited number of articles, including essays from our Review section as well as Journal Reports.

“With this test, we’re aiming to gather feedback about how our readers use the software as well as monitor and improve the technical performance of the software.

“Here are some of the new features you’ll see:

— Better options for sorting the comments for those who want to view them by recency, most-replied and most-liked

— The ability to ignore individual users in the comments by clicking on their username

— The ability to identify your own comments as off-topic, to help others better sort through the discussion.”

Read more here.