A word from the Gothamist tech team:

Hello! You may have noticed that we've changed the way comments work on Gothamist. About a month ago, we transitioned to Disqus, a third-party comment provider. They offer a much better commenting experience than we had before- faster, more stabile, and more secure. Disqus offers three ways of logging in: their own Disqus account (which works at a lot of different websites), or with Facebook or Twitter. For the last month we continued to allow logins with the old Gothamist site commenter logins, but this past weekend we discontinued that feature.

We stopped offering the Gothamist login for two reasons: first, providing it was causing our tech system to become unstable and that was causing slow page loads and site crashes. Second, we've also become concerned about holding commenter login information, which could potentially be misused if we were ever hacked. We had already been planning on phasing the Gothamist login out with our new site design in January, but because of the tech and security issues, we decided to speed that up and get rid of the Gothamist login option this past weekend.