Say goodbye to TheCitizen.com … and say hello to the new TheCitizen.com.
We plan to flip the switch Sunday to go live on our redesigned site. For the technically-minded, we are changing the underlying engine that drives everything on the site from Drupal to WordPress.
That means some changes with how our readers interact with our site’s content. The biggest change will be in the commenting function.
We have some 30,000-plus users who are registered to post comments to stories on our current site. Those who use the commenting function will notice Sunday that the new site’s registration is FaceBook-based.
Any person who has signed up with FaceBook will automatically be approved to post comments on the new TheCitizen.com.
But there will be one big difference: There will no longer be any anonymous users. Our current commenters — whatever their users’ “handles” may be — are welcome to continue commenting on our new site, but they will show up on TheCitizen.com with the same names they use on FaceBook. The old registrations will not work on the new site.
No more anonymous or pseudonymous commenting — if you post a comment, everybody reading it will know who you are, or at least who your FaceBook name says you are.
Thanks to the tens of thousands of online readers who have visited us since we first went online with a pure html-based site in November of 1996. We are looking forward to continue serving you on our new site — TheCitizen.com.
— Cal Beverly, editor and publisher, Jan. 11, 2017
