We’ve resisted requiring registration to the site until now because we’ve wanted to keep things as open as possible. Given some of the rudeness and vitriol that happens more frequently than we’d like and the recent uptick in troll activity, we have little choice but to require anyone who wants to comment to create a Typekey username. (Hopefully it should reduce the amount of spam comments that we have to waste time deleting too.) We just enabled this requirement a few minutes ago so we’re not exactly sure how it’s going to go from a technical standpoint. When you open the Comments of a post it should prompt you to sign in or create an identity. If you have trouble, though, please drop us an email. After you’ve logged at the beginning of a session, you should be recognized and not have to keep logging in every time you comment. Sorry for the inconvenience but hopefully this will result in a more respectful dialogue among those who actually have the site’s, and the community’s, best interests at heart.
Thanks,
Brownstoner


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

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  1. Having been well victimized by the troll and having my display name hijacked on a number of occasions, not only to post insulting remarks, but also to post links to really disgusting photos, I can only say that I am all for registration for whomever wants to use the site. I think the arguing is often aggravating and enlightening, but I also believe that a lot of it was our troll who constantly posted using other names in order to start flame wars.

    Thanks again Brownstoner-

  2. this is great. i’ve been using this site extensively for over a year while looking for a house, and it’s been incredibly helpful, except for all the trolling and flaming. keep up the good work.

  3. There seem to be two issues here:
    Spam
    Dissenting and obnoxious opinions

    While you may have less trolling and spam with registration,
    I think you may lose something intangible with TypeKey since not everyone wants to register.

    TypeKey works, but I wish you would implement Akismet instead (now available for MovableType at http://akismet.com/development/), which allows registration-free commenting.

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