New Participant Registration System

[Update: I’ve added a checkbox on the registration page for academics who would like to join the site as members.]

For security reasons (in particular the glaring ease with which one could post under someone else’s name), I’ve switched the comments settings such that people must now be registered and logged in to comment. As a consequence, I’ve set out two different kinds of user status: participant and member. The following is taken from the revised About page:

Participants have the ability to comment on posts. To register as a participant, you must be affiliated with an academic institution in some way. For instance, present or former students of political thought may register and participate in discussion. To register as a participant at the site, please follow this link. You will need to specify the academic institution with which you are affiliated. Please keep in mind that your registration may take some time to be approved.

Participants are expected to abide by the norms of civil intellectual engagement and may only publish comments under their full names. Public Reason reserves the right to rescind the status of any participant.

Members of the site have the ability to post a variety of items directly to the front page. To register as a member, you must be a bona fide professional academic political philosopher or theorist (where this includes those committed to the academic profession who are temporarily underemployed or unemployed) and have completed your doctoral studies in a relevant discipline.

Those interested in joining the site as members should either register (and check the box indicating a desire to join), or simply send an email to “admin” at “publicreason.net”. In either case, please include a link to your faculty or academic staff webpage (or otherwise attest to your membership in a professional academic organisation such as, for instance, the American Philosophical Association, the Association for Political Theory, or the Political Studies Association in Britain). I will not automatically upgrade the status of any participant whom I recognise as a political philosopher or theorist if that person has not indicated a desire to join the site as a member.

Although it may take some time for new registrations to be approved, it should not take very much longer than approval for new people’s comments took under the older system. Moreover, all approved and logged-in users will now be able to post freely, without having their first comment approved. I’d like to encourage those visitors to the site who have not yet commented to register in a timely fashion should they anticipate wishing to comment at some point in the future, especially in the upcoming Estlund reading group.

It is conceivable that there may be some problem with email notifications of registration approval. Should you have to wait for more than two days for your approval notification and password, please email “admin” at “publicreason.net”. At present email notifications are being sent, but WordPress has been known to have some serious glitches in this respect.

Courtesy of the good people at the Tarski theme, we now have a login link at the top of the page under the header image. Once you have logged in, the link will (as if by magic) switch to an admin link, which you can use to modify your profile. We also have an email updates subscription service, courtesy of Feedburner. Signing up for this service will cause any new posts to be emailed you the following morning. Please keep in mind that these emails will not specify the author of the post. For various reasons, I’ve switched off the option to subscribe to email notifications of follow-up comments. You can already create RSS feeds for entries, comments, and comments within posts.