SacBee's New Coments System A Flop?

Looks like it so far. To recap, the Sacramento Bee suspended comments on October 14 saying they were going to redesign their system. They didn't like some of the comments. A week or so ago (over a month after suspending them) they announced they were starting test run of a new system where 500 readers would be allowed to comment after obtaining a voucher. 

I actually followed a link and filled out the required info. I never received my voucher. Hmmm???

Did it work? You would think this oped in the Bee this morning by Dana Milbank advocating a universal military draft to "restore America" should have drawn a number of comments. Last time I looked, I saw none. 

I made a point to check for comments on some other stories recently. All I found was one in response to an article on how meteorologists are saying it's quite certain this would be a dry year. The comment- from someone I didn't recognize- was simply that we needed more water. I made an attempt to reply to his comment but wasn't allowed to because I didn't have a voucher.

I'm wondering about maybe a couple of things going on: Since 9 out of 10 comments to the Bee were critical of their big government style, maybe a whole bunch of lefties went in first and grabbed all the vouchers? Seems as if it would be a bit hard to pull something like that together, but I have seen what seemed like orchestrated efforts by lefties to dominate the comments there every now and then.

Either that, or maybe I was right earlier on and they don't really want comments back? It may seem a far fetched but maybe they knew which commentators they liked, which ones they didn't and just sent vouchers to their friendly ones. That seems a bit far fetched, though.

Whatever is going on there the new system test doesn't seem to work well, if at all.

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Oh, and since I'm posting on other newspapers, as an aside: The San Diego Union- Tribune web site, which I subscribed to recently, just doesn't work. I have yet to be able to read articles I'm interested in, except for a handful on the main page. No matter what link I click on, I still get sent to the Subscribe page. This despite the icon in the upper right hand corner of the page telling me I'm logged in.

I finally sent them an e-mail yesterday asking to unsubscribe and describing the continuing problem. They asked me to call them on the phone to discuss it. I'll do that later for whatever good it will do. I can't believe it's just happening to me, though.