There has been much talk on the reader blogs about certain reader bloggers "gaming the system" by getting all their friends to rec up their posts. Obviously, since the top five reader posts of the day now reach the TPM homepage, recommendations carry a little more currency than before. As it stood, we only allowed an IP address to recommend a post once, regardless of whether the recommender was registered at TPM.

Today we are changing that. On new reader weblogs created from today on, we will only allow registered TPM users to recommend posts. We will also apply this setting to existing weblogs on a per-weblog basis if we feel they are abusing the recommend feature. To clarify, if you have signed up with TPM and created your personal blog before today, this policy will not apply to your posts. The setting will not be applied to individual posts, but rather to all posts on a blog.

Please let me know if you have any questions.