This is a growing trend, and I love it. The concept is "lazy registration", and it makes perfect sense. I think most sign-up forms are designed out of fear - f

This is a growing trend, and I love it. The concept is "lazy registration", and it makes perfect sense. I think most sign-up forms are designed out of fear - fear of spammers and fear of people quitting the software. Forcing a user to fill out pages and pages of info isn't going to make them more loyal to your site, it just annoys them. It also won't stop spammers - they are just as creative as you are. So let the user use your site (perhaps flagging changes such as comments as pending) but send them a link to authorize their site. Once they've done that, their changes go live and they can fill in the info you need of them. By doing an action (such as commenting), they have proven they are interested and they are much more likely to want to finish the registration process. Edit: On second read-through, I see you might be talking about replacing a login with a URL permanently. I don't like this idea as much as it's a lot easier for me to remember my username/password than I am a unique URL (that's complex enough to not be easily guessable). If you don't want to manage the login process, use an openID provider (and Facebook connect, Google Login, etc).