Until today, you could participate in the online discussions on any of our sites anonymously, with no requirements to register, log in anywhere, or otherwise identify yourself. We know many people appreciated the ease with which they could comment on our articles and weblogs, and in many cases anonymous posters had great things to contribute to these discussions. But in the face of dramatically increasing spam and growing abuse of our system, we’ve now disabled the ability to post comments anonymously.

This is not a decision we’ve come to lightly. We’ve weighed the pros and cons, and we understand that by adding a registration requirement for commenting on our content, we’re limiting the number of potential participants. But in the end, we feel that the high quality of the discussions on our sites is valuable, worth protecting, and more important than easy, anonymous access for comments. After devoting significant resources to purging offensive and inappropriate comments from our sites, we’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t have both high quality discussions and unfettered access to participation.

Don’t get me wrong–we’re not putting any serious obstacles in the way of participation. O’Reilly Network registration is free and easy: just go to http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/on_reg/register/ and give us your name, email address, and your desired O’Reilly Network username and password. Nothing else is required, and your personal info won’t be shared with anyone or used for any other purpose. (See our privacy policy for more details.) You’ll also be able to sign up for any of our free email newsletters so you can get weekly summaries of the content we’re publishing online, as well as news about our upcoming books and conferences.

We hope this move won’t be too much of an inconvenience to those of you who want to engage in discussions around our weblogs and articles. If you haven’t done so already, please do register with us. We want your participation.

Please register and give us your feedback.