The following is taken from https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/
https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/ wrote:Registration keeps out good posters. Imagine someone with an involving job related to your forum comes across it. This person is an expert in her field, and therefore would be a great source of knowledge for your forum; but if a registration, complete with e-mail and password, is necessary before posting, she might just give up on posting and do something more important. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.
Registration lets in bad posters. On the other hand, people with no lives will thrive on your forum. Children and Internet addicts tend to have free time to go register an account and check their e-mail for the confirmation message. They will generally make your forum a waste of bandwidth.
Registration attracts trolls. If someone is interested in destroying a forum, a registration process only adds to the excitement of a challenge. One might argue that a lack of registration will just let "anyone" post, but in reality anyone can post on old-type forum software; registration is merely a useless hassle. Quoting a 4channeler:Trolls are not out to protect their own reputation. They seek to destroy other peoples' "reputation" ... Fora with only registered accounts are like a garden full of flowers of vanity a troll would just love to pick.
Anonymity counters vanity. On a forum where registration is required, or even where people give themselves names, a clique is developed of the elite users, and posts deal as much with who you are as what you are posting. On an anonymous forum, if you can't tell who posts what, logic will overrule vanity. As Hiroyuki, the administrator of 2ch, writes:
If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
He raises valid points. I believe the first argument is especially compelling.
Registration keeps out good posters. Imagine someone with an involving job related to your forum comes across it. This person is an expert in her field, and therefore would be a great source of knowledge for your forum; but if a registration, complete with e-mail and password, is necessary before posting, she might just give up on posting and do something more important. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.
I can relate to this personally. I browse through many other woodworking forums, but I haven't participated in any of them because I don't want to go through the hassle of registering just to make a one-time reply that I think could add value to a discussion. How often have you come across something online, felt you had something worthwhile to contribute, but didn't bother because it required sharing your email and jumping through unnecessary hoops?
Read the full argument here: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/
Opinions?
Added later 04 min:
Just so you know, as you may have seen, we don’t require registration to post topics or replies. I believe we encounter fewer issues compared to sites that try to restrict everything as tightly as possible.