As some of you know, I have some high-level contacts at certain technology companies. It occurred to me that this is a good opportunity to convince them that some changes need to be made to their comment system, so for the time being I’ve removed the Name/URL and Anonymous commenting options. This means you will have to be registered in order to comment. We may eventually go to a system where you will have to be a member of the blog in order to have commenting privileges.
The advantage of this is that trolls and schizos will no longer be able to pretend to be other commenters. My hope is that I will be able to take the evidence and convince Google to make some of the changes I have been recommending to them that will permit us to go back to a more open commenting system, albeit one that gives the moderators more precise and targeted moderation abilities.