With Posterous, you can enable anonymous commenting, so your readers don't need an account to comment.

You can add contributors to any site, and they can post via email without creating an account.

Anyone can go to your site and subscribe by entering their email address. They don't need an account, and they will receive your posts everyday by email.

At Posterous, we try to do as much as we can without forcing people to join.

techtruth, there is no hypocrisy here. We have an API that gives users 100% access to all their content on Posterous, including *the original media that was uploaded, in it's full size*.

This API can be found here:
http://posterous.com/api/reading

There is nothing stopping people from writing Posterous exporters that go to other services. In fact, Wordpress released a Posterous importer a few months ago.

We support data portability. It's the user's content, not ours. It's our privilege to host it for our users, and we are working hard to be the best service out there.

Michael, thanks for the feedback.

Keep in mind, though, that most other services can't even offer the breadth of importers that we offer, period. Because they can't do everything that Posterous can do.

So while we'd love to maintain old urls, and one day we will, our first priority is to at least support all the different post types and media that people are posting.

p.s. your commenting system has bugs