Starting today, your community news site is adding a lot more community. Visitors to our site can now contribute their own comments to all of our news stories, editorials and letters to the editor. You are invited to participate.

Every community has standards and ours is no exception. We ask that you keep your comments on-topic and that they are smart, civil and profanity-free. Try to avoid saying anything you wouldn’t want your mother to read.

To comment, you must have a user account. Getting one requires answering three easy questions and you can sign up at the bottom of any story on our site (including this one). It is important that all participants in a discussion be honest about their identity so we prefer that you use your real name when commenting, though it’s not required. To start things off on the right foot, we do require this of all our employees.

Sometimes people’s passions get the better of them and they leave comments that don’t meet our community standards. In those cases, we ask that you help police the comments by using the “Flag” button beneath each comment. Flagged items are brought to an administrator’s attention.

On the rare occasion when someone simply doesn’t want to live by our community standards, we may prevent them from using the site.

Your opinion counts. Our comments have up and down arrows next to them which allow you to register your approval or disapproval of specific comments with a single click. Comments with a high negative rating from users will disappear from the site, while contributors whose comments generate high positive ratings will be rewarded.

Our goal with this feature is to encourage community discussion and healthy debate and we hope that you will give it a try. Join the conversation today.