A change in online comments

On Monday, the Opinion channel at PilotOnline.com will change.

You'll still find columns like this one, editorials and letters at the region's electronic town square. What you won't find is anonymous comments about them.

Instead, we hope Opinion channel comments will become more like the letters column next door - smart, contentious, civil, responsible. Signed with real names and hometowns, so we all know who's doing the talking.

There is one reason we're making this change. Since the first online message board opened (and The Pilot's was among the first), newspapers have struggled with conflicting impulses. We want to provide a space where people can express themselves. But anonymity, while freeing for a few, also can be so corrosive that it repels as many participants as it encourages.

In the Opinion section, our first responsibility is to the conversation itself. After long consideration, we realized our policies were undermining it online. After watching conversation after conversation devolve, and after hearing from reader after reader complaining that we were encouraging the kind of debate we often lament, we decided to make a change.

Thankfully, we had a handy model. We also had plenty of reason.

Everything on the Opinion pages is signed. This and other columns are signed. Letters are signed. Editorials are signed by six people, every one of whom takes responsibility for them.

Comments at PilotOnline.com are literally the only part of this newspaper's Opinion effort that are anonymous. The resulting asymmetry has led anonymous folks to cross all kinds of lines, of course. But it has also led to a conversation too easily hijacked or diverted and far less than it could be.

There are plenty of places where you can comment anonymously if you choose, including on PilotOnline.com's news content. But not here. Not on the electronic version of The Pilot's Opinion pages.

Anonymity simply doesn't further our mission: Identifying and amplifying solutions to our problems, holding leaders accountable, celebrating our successes.

When we decided to make this change, we also had to decide how. As we were searching for ways to ensure that people are who they say they are, we settled on something many of us use every day: A credit card.

Essentially, you verify your identity by completing a credit card authorization. It doesn't cost anything. It is free. The price is absolutely zero.

You do that once, and you then become what we're calling a "verified commenter."

We don't keep your card number. We won't sell you anything. We won't give away your name. The only thing we do is verify that you are who you say you are. You can find more info at our FAQ at the Opinion channel, under my name.

In exchange for becoming verified, you can comment in the PilotOnline.com Opinion channel, and your comments will appear as soon as you write them, which isn't always the case now.

Is it a perfect system? Nope. Is it the simplest and most reliable one we could think of, both for you and for us? It is. I'm already verified, as are members of the editorial staff.

Critics - many of them anonymous - have claimed that this page is making these changes to silence dissent. I try to be respectful of all opinions, but that one's just silly.

I know there are plenty of echo chambers out there, but this isn't one. This is a town square, filled with ideas and opinions of every kind. Letters criticizing our editorials get priority. We print Objections! to editorials on a regular basis. Our columnists come in every political stripe. Our letter writers reflect the breadth of opinion in Hampton Roads.

It doesn't matter one bit to us whether you agree or disagree with the editorial board. It matters whether you have good ideas and the interest to share them.

I'm sure that the people who have already become verified don't agree with the Editorial Board every day. I know for a fact that most don't.

They do, I hope, share the belief that ownership of words leads to responsibility. That there's no room for people wearing masks in a town square, and that there is real value in knowing who's standing next to you, even metaphorically.

My hunch is that this change will alter how we talk to each other in the Opinion section at PilotOnline.com Exactly how much, I wish I knew. Nobody has tried this before.

The Pilot will go first, happily and with a little trepidation. Please join us.

Donald Luzzatto is The Virginian-Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.