Due to the startling amount of spam that Wordpress allows, public registration to Bunch of Nerds is disabled. Membership is invitation only based on personal referrals, professional respect, and several other factors (tipping us for instance!).

1. Who is able to leave comments on Bunch of Nerds?
Anyone who has been invited by us or our editors. To start the site, we’ve invited a handful of our friends, family, favorite bloggers and frequent tipsters to comment. They have the ability to personally recommend new members to us in order to screen and control user-growth as the site grows. A “Gmail-style” invitation system is currently in the works, at which point we’ll be giving out invitation to our registered members for further distribution.

2. Why is membership invitation only?
As we stated above, comment spam is out of control and this is one of the most effective ways at controlling it, short of disabling comments and membership completely. We also want to spend less time babysitting threads and conversations, and more time hunting out cool stories to post about.

3. How can I become a commenter?
At the moment we’re limiting who is allowed to become a member and commenter. There are however a few ways, if you REALLY want to become a registered commenter.

a) Send us interesting tips [Email address: tips #AT# bunchofnerds.com - replace #AT# with @ ]! We naturally can’t post every tip we receive, but we invite some of our most trustworthy and frequent tippers to comment, as a thanks for helping us make Bunch of Nerds a better place.

b) Persuade us. If you are involved in creating indie games, an artist, toiling away inside of a game developer or publishing company, or someone we’ve mentioned in a past post, we’d be happy to hear from you [Email address: nerds #AT# bunchofnerds.com - replace #AT# with @ ].

c) Create your own blog. Such is the life of a blog, without other bloggers, we wouldn’t exist. We’re happy to include fellow bloggers, so if we post about a story you’ve written on your blog, we’d be happy to hear your input, well, most of the time. ;)

4. Can I comment anonymously?
No, at least not yet. At the startup phase of Bunch of Nerds, we’d prefer to have recognizable commenters who can stand by their thoughts. This is an option for registered members that we’re looking into for the future. Invited users are able to register with whatever username they’d like though, so this give them some control over their identity, we won’t tell, promise.

5. Can I be banned from commenting?
Yes. If your comments are obnoxious, reeking of self-advertisement, or just plain rude, your account can and will be banned. Naturally we have a warning system in place, where we’ll give you a few chances. But, in the end, 3 strikes, you’re out.

As many blogs before us have done so, we recommend you read Lifehackers guide to weblog comments for good pointers on comment etiquette.