Well, that was one heck of a ride, huh?  Hot Air had its first open registration in a very long time — too long, we know — and we had an overwhelming response.  Over 4100 people signed up to comment, which overwhelmed our processing systems and taught us a few valuable lessons for the next time … and there will be a next time, I assure you.

Some may still have questions or concerns, so I’ve gleaned more information about the open registration.  Hopefully this will answer your questions, but if not, I’d ask that you wait until Monday to drop us a note about any other issues you may be having.  Our support staff is currently committed resting at the asylum in a quiet place after having worked incredibly hard for three days to resolve the issues that began on Wednesday.

I’ve registered but not yet logged in.  Can I do so now?

Yes.  Everyone who had not yet logged in should have received a password reset mail that will allow them to log into the system and comment on our site.  If you have not received it, please check your spam folder, as many of those who didn’t see the e-mail ended up finding it there; it came from “mail-at-hotair-dot-com”.  However, if you still don’t see it, you can just click on this link to generate a new reset e-mail.  Don’t do this if you’ve already successfully logged into the system.

I posted my first comment and don’t see it.

We’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating.  Your approval process is not complete until we approve your first comment from the moderation queue.  Please don’t repost the same comment over and over again, because it just slows us down from approving everyone who still has yet to post their first comment.  However, if you want to make comments on other threads, feel free, but just know that none of them will appear until we approve your first comment.

What happened to delay the e-mail process?

It’s a very complicated problem, which involved issues on our end as well as with some major commercial e-mail systems.  Rest assured that they have all been resolved, so our next open registration should go much more smoothly. If that explanation doesn’t satisfy you, just follow Barack Obama’s example and blame George Bush for all our woes.

Why is your registration policy so restrictive?  Why not just have open enrollment all of the time?

While we have a big disclaimer on our comment threads, we do like to maintain some decorum there.  The only people available to police the comment sections are myself, Tina, and Allahpundit, which we have to do while still doing all of the writing that takes place at Hot Air.  If we had open registration all of the time, we’d have a lot less time to write, or we’d have to just let the comments sections go wild with trolling and other issues.

Why did you only have registration open during business hours?  Some of us aren’t able to use the Internet at that time for various reasons.

Well, if the problems we experienced didn’t convince you of the wisdom of doing this when support staff was available, nothing will.  Our next open registration will probably take place in the same kind of time frame, but we’ll try to provide a little more notice so that people can make arrangements ahead of time.

Really? You guys —

Yeah, we know.

Seriously, we want to thank everyone for their patience and understanding, and welcome all of our new friends to our comment threads.  For those who didn’t make it this time, we will have another open registration period soon, so keep reading!