It is with some regret that I make this announcement. You may have noticed that Free Keene has been going through some growing pains recently with a tremendous amount of nastiness coming from anonymous trolls in the comments section. This is to be expected as the site has grown significantly and now exceeds over 50,000 visits per month. With that popularity comes trouble from the haters. For a long time the hateful trolls were tolerated, but some were saying they were driving people away from the site. My websites have always welcomed dissent and open discussion and that will still be welcome here – it’s just that now you’ll need to be logged in to the site to comment, in the same way that you need to be logged in to the Forum to post there
This should still allow the people with serious critique to contribute while preventing the “drive-by” anonymous posters of vitriol. In order to facilitate you signing up and logging in, I’ve added a login widget to the right panel of the site. Make sure to check your spam filter if you don’t see the verification email after you sign up.
Each user having accounts should also eliminate the problem we have had with three different “David”s posting on the same comment thread, making it very difficult to discern who-was-who.
Hopefully this change combined with the new comment voting feature will help skew the comments more in a constructive, conversational direction rather than the troll slugfest that it has been recently.
