Dear Readers,

The Stanford Daily takes great pride in creating and maintaining an active dialogue within the University community. We encourage our readers to voice their ideas and opinions in a respectful, constructive manner that allows all who wish to participate a chance to do so without feeling threatened.

There has been an unfortunate trend in recent weeks on our website of libelous, aggressive and disrespectful comments toward members of the Stanford community, who need not be subjected to malicious and inaccurate statements when reading or commenting on our pages. Our previous system came with a lack of commenter accountability by allowing readers the opportunity to remain anonymous. We believe this privilege has been violated.

With our new system, you will be asked to simply log in via Facebook. We hope this simple step will create the environment that we strive to provide on our pages and help curb the irresponsibility demonstrated by a very small fraction of our readership. An unintended consequence of the new system is that all preexisting comments will be hidden, though not deleted. A more detailed commenting policy can be found under the ‘About’ tab on the stanforddaily.com homepage.

We are tremendously excited to see a spike in our reader-to-reader interaction, and we look forward to continuing to improve your Daily experience. Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Zach Zimmerman

President and editor in chief, Vol. CCXXXIX