With D.C. United’s first playoff match in half a decade coming up Saturday evening at RFK, we figured it was time for a nice chat with Gothamist’s not-so-nice resident soccer correspondent.

This is a post from Gothamist LLC’s friendly tech team. Hello! You may have noticed that we’ve changed the way comments work on DCist. About a month ago, we transitioned to Disqus, a third-party comment provider. They offer a much better commenting experience than we had before — faster, more stable and secure. Disqus offers three ways of logging in: with a Disqus account (which works at a lot of different websites), or via Facebook or Twitter. For the last month, we continued to allow logins with the old Gothamist site commenter logins. This past weekend, we discontinued that feature.

For all the iPhone users out there, a heads up: Gothamist has just released its first iPhone app, dubbed “Istaverse.” You can download it free from iTunes here. There’s a couple things about the application that you should know. For one, the “Istaverse” app is really designed for our readers who like to keep tabs on more than one of the -Ist cities at a time. If you only ever want to read DCist, you…

SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others. Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia’s New Year’s wish list. Gothamist looked at the wooden bikes being offered for NYC’s first bike share program on Governors Island. LAist received a Christmas present in the form of a drunk Santa Claus in a g-string. Bostonist launched…

You may have noticed a number of new features on DCist today, thanks to an -ist network wide upgrade. Since these features are brand new, they’re also wreaking a normal amount of havoc on our servers as the Gothamist tech team races to fix bugs and get everything up and running smoothly. That said, our servers are going down on and off right now, so we’re not at 100 percent today. We appreciate you being…

The cold weather – and holiday festivities – descended upon Gothamist. The Rockefeller Christmas tree was lit, Broadway stagehand finally ended their strike, and NASCAR decided to run their victory lap through Times Square. There were disturbing photographs revealing the working conditions in which many city manholes are produced and ninjas were also a hot topic, either robbing homes or entering into alibis. But the city was really rocked by how Rudy Giuliani’s visits…

Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without an operator provoking a response from the transport authorities. Elsewhere, London’s answer to Central Station is about to open for business, and Londonist got a sneak preview. Meanwhile, spooky goings-on beneath London Bridge, where a cache of skeletons provided an apt story for Hallowe’en….

The Red Sox has permeated nearly every facet of Bostonist’s lives. When they’re not live-blogging the games, waxing poetic about the games, thanking Curt Schilling for his splendid work, or telling Dane Cook to watch his hair, they’re watching certain presidential candidates hop on the Red Sox bandwagon (sorry, Gothamist). The Sox are so branded on the local brain that people are using the Series to spice up their sex lives. Speaking of spice, Bostonist…

Gothamist learned about the craziest urban nightmare come true: A huge python found in the bathroom pipes. It was also a nightmare for some Yankees fans, as manger Joe Torre declined to come back and manage the Bronx Bombers. At least the city’s attempt to give some direction to subway riders was interesting, pranksters went shirtless at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch and the I Heart Brooklyn Girls calendars came out. And just…

As part of our continuing efforts to make the Gothamist network a friendly and reasonably polite place, we’ve now, as of this morning, eliminated “guest” comments on our posts. This means that to comment on DCist and any other -ist site, all users will need to complete a short registration process. A note about privacy: the new system does require a working email address to complete registration. It does not require you to share your…