Profiling

You may have noticed our new Profile system, rolled out a week ago, which segregates our commenters into two groups: those who have a profile (and who are identified by the name that they choose), and those who don't (identified, across the board, as a "guest").

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't like the profile system when I was first told about it by Gothamist, our parent company; in fact, I objected to it pretty strongly. The system that you see on Torontoist today, however, is not only improved from the one that was first unveiled on Gothamist, but has a number of plusses that don't reveal themselves immediately. I know that registering is a bit of a hassle, but there are a ton of benefits:

• You have to register once, and only once.
• It takes less than a minute to sign up and confirm your membership, from start to finish. Seriously.
• You're identified by the name of your choice when you post a comment on an article rather than as a "guest." If your username is already taken by someone else in the system (and isn't something like "Bob"), just e-mail me and let me know what display name you want. (Eventually, users will be able to edit their display names themselves, but this is a decent band-aid solution.)
• There's no annoying "CAPTCHA" (those things where you have to type in what letters or numbers you see in a box) if you want to comment, even as a guest, and our system is way better than some other sites': across Gawker Media sites, for instance, you can't simply register—you have to post a comment that the administrators really, really like and only then will they approve your account.
• You stay logged in, both on Torontoist and across the Gothamist network.
• You get your own fancy-dancy profile page that lists your recent comments (and responses to those comments). Here's mine. Here's Marc's.
• If you already had a Typekey account that you used to comment on Torontoist, you can simply import all your old comments made under it to the new system.
• It all but cuts off comment spam, which is good for us, but even better for you—comments should show up on Torontoist much quicker and there shouldn't be any of those frustrating delays or double-posted comments.
• There are lots of benefits yet to come; this is just the beginning. Gothamist is constantly working on improving the whole thing and welcomes feedback (which we've been giving 'em lots of ourselves).

Photo by tysonwilliams from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.