Update: We’ve closed down registration for today, folks! We’ll do this again soon. Thank you!

Once more unto the breach, dear friends …

As of now, the books are open at Hot Air!  Those who want to add their voices to our comment sections can now register to join our community.  We’ll keep it open until 4 pm ET today.  First read our Terms of Service, and if you agree, register through this link and follow the steps.

Here are a few things to keep in mind.  When you register, we will e-mail you a password.  It may take a while (anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or so, depending on the traffic this open registration creates) to get your e-mail, but it will come to you from “mail-at-hotair-dot-com.”  Please check your spam and junk folders if you do not get the e-mail in a reasonable time, as it is almost certainly there if not in your inbox.  At that point, you can comment, but we have to approve your first comment from moderation before you can post any others. That will take us some time to do, so don’t start shooting us e-mails about how your comment didn’t appear.

If you do not see the message, please e-mail us at “tips-at-hotair-dot-com” from the e-mail account you used to register so we can find your account, and we’ll try resending you the password. Please do not ping us on Twitter, as we can’t help you from that platform.

Also, please note that  if you have been banned before, you will not be approved for commenting now.  We are not going to re-litigate prior violations.  Don’t bother writing e-mails detailing how much you’ve changed in the intervening time.  We are focusing on adding fresh voices today, and don’t have the time to waste arguing over long-settled complaints, nor the inclination to do so.

One final note, to both newbies and veterans: the best way to prevent trolls from disrupting threads is to ignore them. Do not get into name-calling exchanges, because that’s exactly what they want to happen – to make the entire thread about them rather than the topic, and to get you in position to get banned as well. Do not take the bait. If you see a problem, drop us a note on the tips line, but please be sure it’s trolling and not just reasonable disagreement or tit-for-tat ad hominems.

Here are a few other points from earlier open registration days:

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.

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, Erika,, MK, 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 on earlier attempts didn’t convince you of the wisdom of doing this when support staff was available, nothing will. It’s handled that way to have a maximum of manpower on duty when it’s most needed for this work.

What if I have read Hot Air every day for years and yet somehow missed the open registration window that was active for seven hours, er … again?

We plan on having another one in the near future.

I changed my mind about my user name and now want to go by “Hot Gas.”

Stand in line; we get this request a lot, and even we thought about changing our name.  Seriously, though, the username is the key field in the database and cannot be edited.  If you made a typo when entering it, we can’t change it now.

Welcome to Hot Air, and we look forward to your comments!