Elite World News

As some of you may know, we’re planning to move Now Smell This to a new location next month. We’ll be using Wordpress, so we’ll have the ability to open up the comments to everyone — that is, not just registered users — while still preventing unreasonable amounts of comment spam.

A few people have mentioned that they’d rather see comments remain restricted to registered users. I’d love to hear your views on the matter, so please let us know: would you rather that we open up comments to anyone, or keep them the way they are? Two quick points to consider: first, if we keep comments restricted to registered users, everyone will have to register all over again — there isn’t any way for me to migrate the user data to the new website. Second, if the number of comments increases much beyond what it typically is now, I’m not at all sure that we can continue our current practice of responding to all (or almost all, hey, we do our best) comments.

And I should mention that I probably won’t respond to all of your comments today…my goal here is primarily just to find out what everybody thinks on the subject.

Update: Robin (the other Robin, not me) commented below asking why we’re moving, and so I thought I’d add that we’re moving because Wordpress is a much better blogging platform than the one we’re using now. It will be easier for me to run, and we’ll have the ability to use all kinds of great features like tags and gravatars and whatnot.

The biggest drawback to the move is that because of a bug in the platform I’m using now, all of the comments made before the move will be attributed to “Anonymous” on the new site. In other words, we’re going to lose the name of each commenter on every single article posted before the move. I’m terribly upset about that, but there’s nothing I can do about it.