Response to Letter to the Editor: Website

Mr. Pottash: The hosting of The Stute website is provided free of charge by College Publisher, a company hosting many college newspaper web sites. Additionally, College Publisher provides a content management system so that writers and editors can easily publish and edit articles. As a result, all the ads except those in the left column (the Google boxes and the Firefox box) are mandatory as part of our agreement with College Publisher and cannot be removed. However, I am currently working on a new website for The Stute, hosted on the virtual machine server the SGA recently purchased, which gives us full control over the server running the website. When the new site is launched, most (if not all) of the ads will disappear.
Regarding the "Recently Commented" tab, you are correct in your statement. The other two tabs ("Most Popular" and "Most Emailed") are active with current articles. Because of your letter, I submitted a support ticket to College Publisher who informed me that only the entire box can be turned off - one tab cannot be removed under the current College Publisher system.
The Stute is willing to publish signed Letters to the Editor, even those criticizing The Stute's Editorials. A recent example of this is a letter to the editor from Chris LaPilusa responding to the comments of the Editorial "There's more to be done." Mr. LaPilusa's letter allowed the readers to see that there are two sides to every issue; The Stute is more than willing to accept commentary from both sides. While online comments are no longer available, the online "Letter to the Editor" submissions are still available.
I appreciate you taking the time to submit your letter. I encourage all readers with comments to do the same.

Sincerely,
John D. Koch
Technical Editor