We’re excited to announce a brand new update to 953mnc.com — as of today, comments can officially be posted on stories we publish.

Allowing comments has been in the works since we launched the redesign of 953mnc.com back in March. With this new feature, we want to give you more opportunity to interact with other readers and with our staff here.

• RELATED: Redesign of 953mnc.com launched, March 23, 2015

Our commenting system allows users to sign in with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or Yahoo accounts or with an email address. After signing in, you can choose to display your full name or choose a different display name. If you use a social networking profile to sign in, it will automatically pull your photo, but you can change that to another photo. Just click on the profile image in the top right corner of the navigation bar at the top of the site to make any changes to your profile.

When you’re logged in, you can comment on any story posted on 953mnc.com, click “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on comments from other users and share comments to your own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. You can also follow commenting threads on specific stories and follow replies to the comments that you post.

However, there are some rules. We have a commenting policy that we enforce on our Facebook page and will also enforce on 953mnc.com. I encourage you to read the full policy, but here’s a short version too: Don’t use swear words and remember to be respectful of other commenters, even if you disagree with what they post. We want to make sure that all users feel welcome to join our community.

Of course, because this is a new feature, we do expect there to be some issues and bugs starting out. Feel free to click around test out the functions.

I hope you’re as excited as we are about the new commenting system on 953mnc.com. If you have questions or see anything that might be an issue, you can contact me by leaving a comment on this story or sending me an email at kvivian@953mnc.com.