What if you never had to register?

I've never been a big fan of registration. It was a topic we always struggled with when I was at Tribe. Do we need a confirmation email on registration?

Here's a fascinating post that Topix made about removing registration entirely from their comments. Net is that they increased volumes of commenters and dropped their bad posts rate.

Here's a summary of the philosophy that they say comes from a Japanese site called Ni-Chan:

   

Registration keeps out good posters. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.    

Registration lets in bad posters. 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. Trolls are not out to protect their own reputation. They seek to destroy other peoples' "reputation”.    

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.

Good stuff.

Comments

[kareem]

Interestingly, I was going to post a reply to Thor's original post (http://tinyurl.com/lssuy) that your next post links to, but he had registration, so I came here to post my comment. I only realized what I had done in the context of the Topix article when I was in the middle of writing that comment.

Of course, I'm saying that registration kept this "good" poster from posting on Thor's blog, but YMMV regarding the definition of "good" ;)

[Kristopher Tate]

Actually, I think you're talking about ２ちゃんねる (ni-channeru) ( http://www.2ch.net/ ); ２ちゃん (Ni-Chan) is actually known more commonly as ふたばちゃん (futaba chan) -- It's an image board.

Ni-channeru is cool because over 80% of Japan's youth is on this forum, with debates encompassing most of Japan.

Two really neat things that have happened on 2ch are:

1. Someone wrote-in about Toshiba bad-mouthing someone about a legitimate support claim. Within 24-hours, the president of Toshiba at the time (the guy before Shoji Doyama) was on national television apologizing for his company's actions.

2. The other one took place while the Matrix was popular. Someone on the forums proclaimed that they were Neo and that he would be visiting a bank in Shibuya sometime around 2:30 -- Over 5-thousand Japanese people dressed-up as agent Smith to catch Neo in Shibuya. There are photos here: http://matrixinjapan.cool.ne.jp/Mareixreloaded4rd.htm

In short, 2ch is an amazing place. More information about its anonymous posting can be seen at the following wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel#Anonymous_posting

-Kris

[Emma Chee]

interesting, i don't even know how to register to comment and it is killing me

[Emma Chee]

interesting, i don't even know how to register to comment and it is killing me