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Today we’re introducing a new way for our readers to comment on our stories.

Enter , a new tool which will allow you to react and comment on specific parts of our stories with a few clicks, whether it be a sentence, a video, a photo, an entire paragraph or the entire story.

This function is available today in this column for you to play around with, and we will also use it for a new series starting Monday on the challenges of obtaining public records from Hawaii’s state government. If it’s successful in engaging readers and boosting the community discussion, we’ll implement this across all of our stories.

Story comments for news stories almost always hang at the bottom of the articles. Comments are often made in reaction to other comments, and often times, commenters are only posting for themselves. Other times the reader doesn’t even read or process the article before commenting, which only adds to more noise for others to sift through.

With Readrboard’s in-line commenting, readers can now react to the story and the words themselves. I want to encourage our audience to really consider the words in our articles, not just glazing over them trying to find things they agree or disagree with.

This new system allows you to respond in several ways, making it easier for you to express an opinion and see what others think:

• As you hover your cursor over the story, you will see the ReadrBoard logo at the end of each paragraph. Hover the cursor over the symbol and you will see a number of preset reactions you can click on.

• You can also select some text in the paragraph, and then react to that specific set of words.

• You can also click on “Respond to this” and type in your own reaction, limited to only a few characters. These reactions will show up to other users. If you took the words right out of their mouth, they can simply +1 your comment with a click.

• You can also react to photos and other elements in the same way.

If you’re still lost, hopefully this video will help you out.

None of this is meant to replace our traditional Facebook commenting at the bottom of our stories. The issues we cover require long-form responses. We want you to converse and have dialogue with each other and us.

And for now, you do not need a Facebook account or any other account to use ReadrBoard. After reacting twice, you will need a login, either via Facebook or signing up through ReadrBoard. Although we prefer no anonymity in our community, this is a new type of interaction and we want to see how you use it without requiring you to log in to anything. We can always adjust the threshold depending on the community needs.

This is a great way to gauge more real-time reader reaction to our content. This will attach your reactions and opinions to the stories and words you care about, and make it easier for your thoughts to be heard. As always, let us know what you think.