If you are a frequent visitor to www.middletownpress.com, you may have noticed that we changed the way we monitor online comments today around noon. This change was made after multiple requests by readers and community members, in addition to in-depth discussions among the staff on this topic over the past few months.

The Middletown Press no longer allows online comments to appear its site immediately. All comments must now be approved by a moderator before they are posted.

The Middletown Press and its sister publications, The Register Citizen in Torrington and the New Haven Register, are continuously discussing comment systems and their benefit for the community.

We get hundreds of comments every day, and it happens 24-7. Led by some of the more controversial topics of the day, our story comment system has become a place for the community to engage in a continuous, back-and-forth debate with each other.

It has helped “enemies” better understand each other’s viewpoint. It has brought new information to light. It has given frustrated constituents an outlet and a gathering place. All of those positive things were in danger — some would say, long past the point — of being lost in the nasty, offensive, abusive, personal comments that a small minority of readers were making.

The old system allowed story comments to go up immediately, and relied on fellow readers to “report abuse.” When those reports were made, offensive comments were taken down, usually within an hour. Readers still have a chance to “report abuse” on any comment they see on our site that they deem offensive in any way, and we encourage this participation.

With the new system where staff is screening comments before they go up, however, we hope to eliminate the nastiest comments on the site. The tradeoff is a momentary-to-slightly-longer delay before everyone’s comments go up.

Our thinking is that it’s less onerous than requiring readers to register an e-mail address and remember a login and password every time they visit the site. When requiring registration, it is also possible for users to circumvent the system by creating a false e-mail address and a false name, defeating the purpose.

But we are not ruling out a system like that down the road, or any system. We’d like your thoughts on this. Please leave a comment below, send us a letter to the editor at letters@middletownpress.com, or e-mail me directly at editor@middletownpress.com.