A lively, more civil online debate

This week, The Pilot's Opinion page reached a milestone of sorts. A little more than three months after we began requiring online commenters to verify their identities with a free credit card transaction, the 300th person signed up.

As a guy afraid of jinxing any success, I'll admit to knocking on wood even as I type this (a neat trick, if I do say so). I'll keep on knocking for a few hundred words. Don't worry; I'll also keep worrying about whether the success can continue and what we can do to help it.

Our goal from the start of this was to find a way to elevate the tone and content of the debate at PilotOnline.com's Opinion channel. The model was the letters column on the opposite page, where writers have always been required to identify themselves. That standard has worked very well for a very long time, encouraging some of the most vibrant debate of anyplace in Hampton Roads.

But few newspapers had tried this before - asking people to take as much personal responsibility for what they wrote online as in print. Few had tried to bring that kind of accountability to its website, even to the little electronic corner that the opinion pages occupy.

And for an institution with the competing impulses of free and responsible expression, we worried that we could be flicking the switch that turned off all debate.

Thankfully, that didn't happen. The number of posts on editorials, letters and columns slowed initially, but it has rebounded, especially at bletters.com, our letters to the editor blog.

We were likewise worried that we were overestimating the pernicious effect of anonymity. That requiring people to identify themselves wouldn't have any effect on some of the nastier behavior.

That also proved to be wrong. Not just wrong, though. It proved to be wildly wrong.

Before the switch to verified commenting, we would regularly find it necessary to delete trollish or racist or otherwise inappropriate comments. Since the switch, we've had to do almost none of that. That's all the more impressive because comments at the Opinion channel are posted automatically and are longer than on the rest of PilotOnline.com.

The content of the comments on letters, editorials and columns has been so uniformly better, in fact, that we've been running them regularly in our letters column. That's the highest praise I know.

If I had worries going into this, so did the folks who complained about the changes. There weren't many of them, but they were mighty loud, at least at first.

They worried about the security of the system and their credit cards. Both proved perfectly safe.

They worried that this was all about squelching disagreement with our points of view. Thankfully, folks who disagreed with us before the switch have been happy to disagree with us afterward.

They worried that this would quiet the cops and teachers and others who felt they needed the cover of anonymity. Some of those folks have signed up, with no ill effects. Some have moved on. But everyone still has my e-mail address, donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com, if there's something I need to know.

I haven't heard from any of those worriers in months. I have heard, daily, from PilotOnline.com readers who've decided to sign up, who appreciate the changes and want to encourage them. Sign-ups average a few each day, but even after three months, hardly a day goes by without somebody new joining the conversation.

I hope you'll join us. As of Thursday, 310 of your neighbors already have.

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