Duct Tape and a Prayer

I’ve been receiving a number of pissing-contest comments recently. (No, I haven’t approved all of them, or even most of them.) Mostly they take the form of “well, this contradicts what conventional wisdom says I should think, so clearly you are wrong“. Mostly, also, they are from – as Slashdot so elegantly puts it – anonymous cowards.

I use my real name on this blog. All I ask is that if you want to leave a comment, you provide some way to consistently identify yourself; I don’t care if you use “Marilyn Monroe” as long as there’s some consistency between comments. Since I started Duct Tape, I’ve trusted commenters to do this on their own, but it’s clear that there’s a certain segment of the commenting population that I simply can’t trust that way. It sucks, because I know that in order to cut out the people who are doing the wrong thing, I have to put an extra burden on the people who are already doing the right thing, but I hope in the end it makes this a more pleasant place to be.

The bottom line is that I’ve decided to enable comment registration. Basically, you need to register as a user here at Duct Tape before you comment. Accountability goes a long way toward cutting down on comments like “you’re wrong because you just are!” (and didn’t we get over that in the fourth grade, guys? really). Registration should be a quick and easy process, but if you have any trouble with it, drop me a line by email (canthony AT etherjammer.com) or on Twitter (@etherjammer) and I’ll see what I can do.

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