New Comments Policy

As part of the launch of the new Observer website, there’s going to be a slight change in comments policy here.

Bad news first: readers will be required to go through a one-time registration before they can comment. The registration requires a username -- which can be anything -- and an email address, which is used to send secure automated responses to users when they do things like change their password. This won’t prevent anyone from commenting anonymously, and we won't see or use your email address for anything that's not a service you ask for specifically.

The good news is that there’s going to be more stuff to comment on: the Politicker and the other blogs, as before, but also the stories and columns in each week’s paper as well as the web-only features that we’re going to start posting a lot more frequently.

The new system will make us much better at weeding out spam – the sort of stuff that slows things down for everyone.

And to the extent that the registration process has a chilling effect on the very small number of readers who visit the site to post poop-and-fart jokes about the subjects of our coverage (and other commenters, and random staffers, and people we’ve never heard of) we’re prepared to live with it.

But enough about us…