Forums mIRC Help Guest posting suggestion...

Shouldn't you do the way most forums do, and enable guest posting in the Help forum, which is where most questions from bypassers with problems go? Not only is the need for registration and pass email verification annoying for someone who only wants to post one question here and never make any posting again, but you also fill your own user database with junk, by keeping records of people who registered to post once and never even visited this board again after getting an answer. I'll bet if you verified your account database, you'd find that 70% or more of the accounts were only logged onto once and have been dead since.

Often someone has to post more than once in a single thread to get a satisfactory answer. It would also probably increase the amount of spam and 'lazy' questions (where the poster could easily have searched and found the answer but instead wants it handed to him) 100-fold or more.

I don't agree that it's a nuisance to register, nor do I agree with your idea that "most" forums don't require registration. I am a member of 15 - 20 forums and only one allows anonymous participation. It takes 30 seconds to fill out the form. Perhaps there could be an automatic expiry of users dormant for, say, a year or more, or whatever time the owners feel appropriate though not many forums would have this feature. In any case a username and password won't take up much space in the database. The posts take up far more room.

I am going to code a forum for my own website next year (a project that'll take time due to other commitments) but one thing I will "try" to implement is a timeout on dormant accounts. At the end of the day though, it's not really important. What is important is that all people that use this place have a sense of 'belonging' and not just being a guest and perhaps feeling les important. To achieve this requires that all users register.

I see it differently, Guest accounts will lead to more spam. Some spammers might not want to take the time to register, confirm an email, etc. However if they could just click "post" and spam away, I'm sure many more people would.

With many comments, code is leading the path i chose. Guest accoutns lead to more "Wanna make free money?" "Work from home, get paid thousands!!!", and more. Users will be able to post, and we will not have a definative way to block users. Atleast this way bots that surf the web cant easily search for form fields in the code, and replces entried with information they deem to be "imprtant" (spam). We have enough troublesome posts as it is, why stockpile them?

Allowing "guest" posters would be a wide open invitation to come annoy me. If ppl dont want to take the short amount of time needed to register, it makes me wonder why not. For someone who only wants to post one question and thinks they will never come back once that one is answered, its easy enuf to go to one of the several #mIRC to ask it.

Sure, there are lots of ppl who registered and so far posted once, a few times, never. But who knows how many of them come to read and learn, find their answers and have no need to post their question, but having registered feel a sense of belonging and know help is available at any time.

From what i've seen, the forum that doesnt require registration is the rarity

For the geeks of us wondering...

____ User Stats Update ____
(I posted something like this on the old forums)

There are 21,572 registered users.
---------------------------------
17,657 users (82%) have 0 posts.
1,624 users (7.5%) have 1 post.
1,895 users (8.8%) have 2-9 posts.
396 users (1.8%) have 10+ posts.
(97 users (.46%) have 50+ posts.)
(54 users (.25%) have 100+ posts.)

Personally, I don't think allowing annonymous posting will cut down on the number of registered users, consindering the stats clearly show that most registered users dont like to post on these forums.

Oh yea, and there are presently 38,710 posts archived.
That comes to 1.8 posts per person. (not counting deleted posts)

- Raccoon

No-one is disputing the number of registered users, etc. How many lamers use a registered name on IRC? 2%? 1%? 0.00001%? Well I'm getting warmer anyway. Registration is a way to make people think twice about being stupid because in reailty who is going to register, knowing that they are also leaving their IP address in the database and then get upto no-good? This forum would have all manner of flooders and spammers here in no time at all if guest usage was allowed.

Yes, my post was supporting your view, not opposing it.

The idea about registering to damper the number of lamer-attack/troll posts was already posed earlier, and I agree with it. I was trying to discount the excuse that "requiring everyone to register just so they can ask a question, fills the user database with useless entries", as most of the users who registered have never made a single post anyway.

- Raccoon

I see now, and you are quite right too.