To comment or not to comment...

I certainly hope that you'll decide to comment — especially since we've got a swanky new comment system running now. One of my own pet peeves about commenting here in the past was the need for e-mail confirmation, which was handy for keeping spam out, but was slow and potentially annoying when you wanted to leave comments. With this new system, you can set a password linked to your e-mail address and use it to make comments — sans confirmation e-mails — on sites throughout the Weblogs, Inc network. So set yourself up in the system and feel free to speak your peace — sans e-mail confirmation.

Update: To answer a few frequent questions:

Yes, you will be able to change your password; our developers are working on the tool that will allow you to do so. In the meantime, we are hard-pressed to think of any modern browser that will not automagically remember your password for you — please use this as a temporary solution!

Extraneous http:// links inserted in some name links will be fixed very shortly.

The "E-mail me when someone replies" function is only going to email you when someone replies to your specific comment — not to the post in general. Let this be a hint to you that we will be rolling out Engadget-style comment threading in the future , and this is where that feature will come into play. However, currently our comments are not yet threaded, so you shouldn't actually get any email reply notifications — yet! Stay tuned... Rome.com wasn't built in a day.