Newspaper makes readers pay for their nasty comments

American Newspaper Sun Chronicles has had just about enough of readers leaving obscene and explicit comments. Their answer? Ask users to register with their real names, address, phone number, email and credit card  number to pay a one-time fee of $0.99. Once a user has completed this requirement, their comments will include their name and  hometown.A spokesperson for the Sun Chronicles said "This is a necessary step … to eliminate past excesses that included blatant disregard for our appropriateness guidelines, blind accusations and unsubstantiated allegations."I can understand the reason why they've taken this stance. Removing the anonymity will eliminate comments from people who are only interested in bad mouthing without  backing their opinions up. But what we mustn't forget is that the online content is free for all - whatever you post should be open to good and bad comments. Feedback stirs discussion and without it, there is no way to know if you really are relevant to your audience. Being required to register your real name is somewhat understandable but to charge me for my 'commenting privileges' is a bit too much - we're all entitled to free speech. Getting people to post comments is already a hard task in itself.  A payment system to comment is going to be a real deterrent.If the New Zealand Herald website started charging you to comment on articles, would you pay up or just stop commenting altogether? Our guess is the latter.I'm all for encouraging intelligent, insightful comments and making sure people who express their opinions don't hide behind a curtain. I just hope the decision to charge their readers for commenting truly is to filter out those who don't add value to their site , rather than a quick-fix revenue generator.