Please feel free to comment and comment often. (Click to enlarge)

You may have noticed the new commenting system here on the website with our magazine stories and blog posts. I want to make sure you’re aware of the different features that are available to improve your online conversation with our bloggers and other site visitors.

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You can now log in, and there are tons of ways to do that —With your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, OpenID or Disqus profile.

Want to log in with your Facebook account but don’t want your comment showing up on your Facebook profile? No problem; it won’t post to your wall unless you purposefully click the button under your comment telling it to also post to Facebook.

Keep conversations together by replying directly to the site visitor you're talking to. (Click to enlarge)

Don’t have a social network profile to log in with? You can quickly sign up for a Disqus profile at the time you comment. Cool thing about that is, tons of other websites use Disqus as their commenting system, so it will recognize you and save your comments with your profile on Disqus.com, allowing you to edit or even delete them later.

You don’t have to log in, but here’s the deal: When you log in with one of your social media accounts or your Disqus profile, your comments show up with your profile pic. And that’s fun!

Profile pics are way better than the gray avatar guy. (Click to enlarge)

Your profile pic, along with an excerpt of your comment, shows up in our Recent Comments box on the side of the website to the right. And your neighbors would much rather see your pic over the gray-silhouette-shadow-man-avatar thing that shows up as a default.

Other features include the ability to reply directly to another site visitor’s comment, to include a photo with your comment, and to subscribe to notifications of other comments on the string.

But for those of you who straight-up just want to comment like the old days without all the fluff — you can still do that, too.

If you have any questions about this, send me an email.