Site issues/suggestions:

First, I want to thank you for not using Facebook for your commenting system, since Facebook censors conservatives.

I also want to thank you for not using Disqus, which is better than Facebook, but which blocks printing/saving of article comments.

However, the system that you're using has a lot of usability problems:

1. The formatting is unconventional, and undocumented. When composing a comment there's no help/advice about how to do so.

(This should be very easy to fix!)

1. Embedded HTML (such as <b>...</b>) does not work at all.

1. Bare hyperlinks which begin with http or https are handled very strangely. Sometimes they turn into clickable hyperlink URLs, as expected. Sometimes they turn into "embeds," which are snippets from the linked page. Sometimes the original URL is still visible, but sometimes it disappears, as well. There's no obvious pattern to the behavior.

1. There's no "preview" or "edit/fix" option, to help commenters get it right. All we can do is try things and see how they come out.

1. When it decides to create an "embed" from a link, there's a little "edit pencil" which we can click to turn each embed on or off. That's nice, except that if we turn it off then the original link is gone, too. There's no option to just show the link, as typed: it's the embed, or nothing.

1. There's no "permalink" which links to the comment.

Please fix these issues!