"Minimalism"? Yeah, right. (Page 2 of 3)

you explained yourself how easy it is to get a free spam address at Yahoo or MSN - thus the email address is no tool for the fight ... trolls are never stupid enough to use their real email addresses.

the only sure information you have on forum users, whether they post anonymously or have to register, is their IP addresses - although most forum admins probably won't know what to do with those. everything else can be (and is) easily faked.

in my opinion it does more harm than good, hassling 1000 users for information which for the most part will be useless to you anyway, in the hopes that you'll be able to catch the one troll in the flock of a thousand - which never happens anyway, unless your troll is dumb enough to register with his real name or email address.

While true, there is one thing you're forgetting: Automated spam bots. Requiring an e-mail adress (as long as a user have to verify it) will stop most of those.

I'm sure there are other solutions to this minor issue. Any bit of client-side JavaScript should already confuse 90% of them sufficiently, for example.

Or if you're really paranoid, use the "repeat this code" system, where you display a warped GIF version of some text that the user has to repeat. (btw, I personally think this is a rather annoying system, and I'm sure the "human check" could be done in much simpler and more efficient ways)

I don't see what's pointless about weighing all the pros and cons - if you think it's pointless, you didn't have to participate, but you did anyway, so it was at least important enough for you to to bother writing a reply

What sort of forum do you run, where you expect 10 dumbass kids for every user? ... on our forums, we have about 600 users and 15000 posts, it's been running for about 2 years - we've never been hit by trolls or spam bots yet, I really only think that happens to very large forums? I doubt if anyone would bother hitting a forum as specialized as ours with spam...

I look at the statistics, and see the same 4-5 users answering most of the questions. I would like for every passer-by to be able to contribute their knowledge, with a minimum amount of hassle - not only are many of the more skilled and experienced users too busy to bother with a registration, they're also smart enough to know that entering your real email address on a forum potentially means stepping into a spamtrap; if not by forum admins collecting your email addresses, then by email harvesters picking it up.

But every forum has it's own needs - we're merely trying to figure out what ours are

As a user, however small, of PunBB I tend to notice threads that start off attacking the feature set of a fine package. I felt this is the way this thread started. It would have been very simple to make a feature request for login option to disable the email requirement (which I think would make you happy) when posting as a guest. And perhaps a simple explanation why you would like this feature. Perhaps just my way of looking at things.

Well, currently not much. But as developer of phpCOIN for initial relases, it was quite busy. Within a year, probably close to  1000 users and 4-5000 posts. I had to clean up ads / stupid remarks / unrelated spamming / etc. probably about a dozen or so times a week. Also I said for every  intelligent guest input, I had to deal with 10 dumbass comments. Not for every user as you quoted. I still think that is realistic.

Also I see plenty of "public discussion" sites where there are worthless posts that degrade the actual topic of discussion. Nothing worse than digging through several pages of a thread to read a dozen worthwhile posts.

Perhaps you're putting to much emphasis on your preferences when passing by. Most forums will let guests posts, and while I consider myself fairly busy, I surely don't mind one extra field to post my thoughts, and as I said autofill generally does it for me. Also- most people tend to have some ego component that they will want credit for their thoughts.

Sorry, like I said I saw it as a complaint about punbb features, when in reality it is a simple feautre request.

What you're arguing is personal preference of different users. I don't think you'll change any minds, so why push it.

btw, Shii, what's a TypeKey?

http://www.sixapart.com/typekey/

Well, I got into this thread rather late, I was just pointing out how Pun works. On some systems, you get an email and you have to confirm you exist and then you're able to sign in.

So in Pun's case, it's really easy to sign up and start posting. You can give a valid email or not, it's really up to you. It may change in the future, I don't know, but I like it this way at least for my needs.

Email addresses are worthless for much verification nowadays. I use SpamBob.net for most e-mail addresses I give out now, but there's nothing stopping me giving out a .com address to really shady sites.

I figure maybe, the best way to let people register, is not make it obvious the function exists. A user posts as a guest under a nickname, but maybe an optional form field, like, ''Registration brings certain benefits to posting. If you want to register, enter your email address in this field. You can use the SpamBob.net service if you want to remain anonymous.''

Then it could make their post, but remember that they wanted to register. It could send an email to the address providing a link to register (something like register.php?post=123&key=456789) and when they completed registration, it would convert the post they made to a full one.

I just found out about a registration system even easier and more useful than TypeKey:

http://openid.net/

Looks great!

wouldn't a universal username/password (or even an OpenID identity) mean that spam bots would only need to register one account to be able to spam every participating site?