You can help us make Sacramento a stronger community by contributing to The Sacramento Press. Our website is free and open to the public. To become a community contributor, all you have to do is: 1. Sign up by clicking the button at the top of the page. 2. Then, once you are signed in, you will see a "write" button at the top of the page. Just click the "write" button, fill out a form and watch a tutorial. 3. Title your Storyline. This is the topic you intend to write about and it helps tie y... KathleenHaley Ben Ilfeld comment-12278 2009-08-19T01:22:59Z 2009-08-19T01:22:59Z I agree that it should be easier to write! That's why we are building better solutions. Of course, we are doing quite a bit of overhaul and the process will not happen overnight. We have three layers of permissions for actions on the site. The first is that if you can read something you can flag it as offensive, spam or duplicate. If you can read it you can be offended. The second is for commenting, rating and tagging stories. You must register for an account, but you can use a user name rather than your real name. All you need is an email address and your zip code. The third level allows you to write articles. We ask people to give us additional information including a real name and physical address for legal reasons, transparency and our ability to contact writers. We are open to suggestions about changing the permissions, how to make writing articles easier and the rating system. We are always looking to integrate feedback into our future releases. The site a work in progress and certainly not ideal. Thank you for hanging in there. Perhaps you could email me at support@sacramentopress.com with these suggestions as well. Ben Ilfeld 2009-08-19T01:22:59Z barney comment-12246 2009-08-18T00:31:40Z 2009-08-18T00:31:40Z I find it to be at least somewhat hypocritical and against the spirit of the site that when signing up to contribute, a person must fully disclose her identity; however, giving thumbs up or down on a comment or article remains completely anonymous. If these activities are to be treated as contributions to the site in the context of an open community in which ideas and opinions are to be transacted and transparent, any reader should be able to see who gives thumbs up or down. To prove my point, let's assume the opposite were true. I publish a highly controversial article and get my 10 closest friends to give it a thumbs up, but their identities remain protected. This creates a conflict of interest whereby the opinions of the community are not necessarily reflected by the perceived popularity of my article. The same could be said about any given comment on this site. In the case of many articles written on this site, I question whether or not the staff (or a writer's PR agency, for instance) intentionally give thumbs down to opinions while equally valid, are dissenting or unpopular. This is as much a cowardly act as is my own decision to remain completely anonymous as I post this comment. But, if this site were to remain true to its own standard of journalism, people who give thumbs up or down should as accountable for their own actions as I should be accountable for my own words above. Maybe I would choose to be more public if the site owners would hold their own writers accountable for rating an item up or down. Or are the owners too cowardly to hold their own staff accountable for their opinions? Either way, this site will remain in its infancy until it can truly escape from its own hypocrisy and double standards to become any form of "journalism" with a capital J. Why don't you just give me thumbs down already, cowards? How about we have an actual debate of the facts? The fact is that it shouldn't be so damn hard for people to write on this site... don't you want more people to write? barney 2009-08-18T00:31:40Z barney comment-12194 2009-08-16T06:08:28Z 2009-08-16T06:08:28Z Wow, I never knew writing could be as easy as following a multi-step process that requires directions to understand barney 2009-08-16T06:08:28Z