Open participation: a note about registration

Update: currently anonymous users can reply to forum posts, but they cannot create a new forum thread. The major difficulty in allowing anonymous users to post anyting anywhere is to deal with spammers who abuse everything that can be abused. Our aim is to give anonymous users as much possibilities to participate as possible, but it will depend on our technical ability to fight spammers and other abusers.

This site is community based, yet registration is not required before you can take part in the discussion. Most sites require you to be logged in before you can post comments, and some sites won't even let you view the content if you are not registered and logged in. We couldn't find any compelling reason to do the same.

We believe that many people who will come accross this site could have something valuable to contribute in passing while not having the time to go through the registration process.

Of course, we will look out for spam, and try to make it more difficult for spamming robots to automatically post irrelevant content. Anonymous comments will therefore have to be reviewed before they are published.

Meanwhile, regular visitors may as well register: they will benefit from a wider range of features.

We decided to allow anonymous visitors to participate fully in the discussion for the following reasons, among others:

• A visitor just passing by may have something valuable to contribute, but be too busy to go through a registration process. We do not wish to lock them out.
• We are not after user data: we really have no use for your email or other personal data.