You may have already noticed that all the -Ist sites made a slight adjustment to the way comments appear overnight. We’ve adjusted our default settings so that unless you choose to see them, the gray “guest” comments, those written by people who choose not to register for our commenting system, will be automatically hidden. You can, if you choose, still view guest comments by selecting “show guest comments” at the end of any post. I had a little bit of trouble getting the feature to work in Firefox this morning, but found that after a few tries at clicking, it worked.

Why are we doing this? If you read our comments, you can probably guess. Guest comments, while occasionally valuable, tend by and large to be the place where people with only insulting, obnoxious things to say reside. We’ve found the commenting experience to be greatly enhanced by hiding guest comments — it’s as though suddenly everyone who comments on DCist is reasonable and engaging. That’s the kind of experience we’d like all of you to have, thus the change to the default setting.

If you’ve been holding out on signing up for the commenting system, please remember: it takes about 20 seconds, we will never release your email address to anyone or use it in any way other than to verify that you are not a spam-bot, and you get a nifty new Profile page in our system (here’s mine) to keep track of all of your comments. So take a minute and register right now.

Will we eventually do away with guest comments all together? Probably. We’re still working it out among all the -Ist sites. For now, we hope you enjoy the new default setting as much as we do.