I am provisionally opening comments back up. Regulars may recall that I went to restricting them to people who had registered. Unfortunately, Blogger limits that to Open ID or people with Blogger accounts. I had hoped to be switched over to WordPress an eternity ago, which allows for much more user friendly ways of registering, but that is on hold for now.
Please use a handle of some sort. And no nastiness, otherwise we go back to status quo ante, pronto.
woohoo bring back the bubble too
Now we all finally have an alternative to Yahoo when the vitriol gets too thick there! Just kidding.
I personally favor this change, as I like wide open discussion of all participants, even with a guise of anonymity. I say that even being one of the targets of earlier hostility; the speakeasy just has a certain vibrancy and ample supply of interesting commentary to it.
My day job is work on authentication mechanisms (including OpenID, where I sit on the security committee). Time and time again I've wondered at how every new social technology that was very successful had very weak authentication and authorization. At this point, I think that's not so much accident as consequence.
I think this is a good move.
I'm OK with the change, although really, you could have left out the Anonymous option and just added the Name/URL option, which is every bit as quick and convenient (and weakly authenticated), but it's a bit nicer if you force people to at least make up a pseudonym on the spot so you don't have to preface replies with "To Anon at 10:36am …". Sometimes complete anonymity is overrated. ;)
Also, I notice that this Reader Notice was posted today (Tuesday), but it's already "below the fold" on the Recent Items list at the top. Time to expand that list to 7 or 8? And if there's any way to fix the Recent Items so that there's not a delay in its rendering, that would be wonderful. (It appears to be some kind of AJAX foolishness or something. Maybe ndk or another software person familiar with Blogger/Wordpress would have a suggestion.)
Thank you. I had one comment I wanted to post recently, but the impulse to comment didn't outweigh the work of creating a new login.
This continues to be one of my favorite blogs and comment sections.