Sorry, anonymous, you'll need to register

Starting tonight, you will need a user account to leave a comment on the site. Yes, the days of 'anonymous' comments are over. If you don't have one already, sign up for your Capitolhillseattle.com user account here (btw, you might need to check your junk mail for the confirmation e-mail -- gmail, in particular, hasn't been friendly to our sign-up process). 170 of you already have. Thanks for being part of the neighborhood.

So, why the change? For the first few months, we didn't require registration to leave a comment on this site because that's the way Central District News has been running their site. To post a story or a picture, you need a user account but to weigh in on the topics at hand, all you need to do is enter a name and e-mail address and, ta-dah, you can add your $0.02 to the conversation.

There are benefits to this arrangement. For one, the site gets more comments because it's easy for anybody to contribute. And we do have a lot of quality additions to the site's information from people who haven't registered but are active commenters.

There are also negatives. For one, it's much harder to slow down people who troll or spam. While we haven't had many problems with spammy erectile disfunction ads, there are a few regular visitors who contribute only to confuse and/or stir up controversy. While I'm cool with controversy, I'm not cool with a singular dedication to it. That kind of information doesn't help anybody because, well, it's not real -- it's fiction created to get a rise and irritate. And I have very few qualms about making it harder to play that game.

The first step is to put everybody on an even comment playing field. Then, at least, there will be a central entity for each commenter that can be held accountable. I don't expect to execute some massive sweep kicking off users right and left. Instead, I assume some of the more dedicate troll-y types will register and we can let their reputations build themselves. If somebody earns their way out of the mix, this way, we'll be able to do something about it.