You need an account to comment on this site. Not an email address typed into a box — an actual account, with a password, that persists. This rules out a category of reader we would otherwise have heard from, and we want to be straight about why we accepted that cost.

The case against anonymous comments

Unauthenticated comment forms attract automated abuse at a rate that has nothing to do with how popular the site is. A form that accepts a name and a body is a form that accepts a thousand of them an hour. Every mitigation — CAPTCHAs, honeypots, IP throttling — degrades the experience for the people you wanted, while barely inconveniencing the people you did not.

Attaching a comment to an account changes the economics. Flood control can follow the account rather than the address, which is what makes it effective against someone rotating IPs.

How it is enforced

Not with a check that could be forgotten. The comment table has no guest-name column, the user reference is required, and the service function takes the author id as a mandatory argument. A route that failed to authenticate would not silently write an anonymous row — it would fail outright. Anonymity is impossible by construction rather than by policy.

What we owe you in return

Your comment renders as text, always. Not as HTML, and not through a sanitiser that has to be right every time — as literal characters. Sign-in state lives in cookies your browser will not hand to a script. You can delete your own comments. Your email address is never shown to other readers, and never included in the data the comment thread sends to the browser.

If pre-moderation is ever switched on, your comment will still be visible to you, marked as awaiting review, rather than vanishing. A comment that disappears silently gets posted three more times, which serves nobody.