The Post has long pushed its online boundaries, putting more stock in their website than most of their competitors and launching blogs for pretty much everything. Now they’re taking the next step — they’re allowing comments on articles.

Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com’s executive editor, made the announcement yesterday, writing:

Over the next several weeks, we’ll begin allowing comments on articles from registered users of washingtonpost.com. To allow for us to get into the rhythm of moderating this new feature, we will roll this out on a few sections per week. Within the next few weeks, we hope you’ll see this functionality on articles in the Sports, Arts & Living, Metro, Travel and Health areas. As of today, users can comment on sports articles.

This is quite the step for a newspaper that has haphazardly navigated the world of online reader comments. Recall that it was only this past January that the Post was forced to shut down the comments section on their official blog, only to re-open it later and with stricter control of what could be said and what would be promptly trashed. D.C. Wire, the Post’s politics blog, has similarly fought a battle against rogue commenters (most of them Jonathan Rees and his many, many crazy aliases), going so far as to delete large numbers of comments and threaten to shut down commenting altogether.

They have learned their lesson, though. Commenters will have to register, and more importantly, users will be able to flag offensive commentary for eventual removal by Post staff. Pretty much anything containing “profanity, personal attacks or spam” will be removed, thus bringing an end to Rees’ sad commenting career. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before someone or another claims that their completely legitimate comment was removed because it was either too liberal or too conservative.

We’re looking forward to seeing the feature rolled out, especially on articles dealing with national politics. And without kissing the Post’s ass to much, we continue to be impressed with their online innovation. Comments can be quite the beast to tame, though, so we’re curious to see how the Posties handle this one.