That's an interesting stat, Eric.  Thanks for providing it.  I was curious about that myself.  

I'll admit to being one that almost always started from the Disqus dashboard.  Not because I was trying to avoid DP pages, but because it consolidated most recently commented-on articles (with their title/link/first few lines) in a great, easy-to-navigate format.  I LOVED that!  And it's what I'm going to miss the most.  

I applaud the attempt to weed out the trolls and clean up the discourse here.  I'm OK with the (somewhat tedious) rating of other posts.  But unless there's a similar index of active threads somewhere I haven't found yet, that will be the most disappointing loss. 

Either way though, I appreciate that the DP is keeping a comment system in place rather than just giving up on it altogether like other newspaper sites have.