Remove blocking of Unregistered
 

Please have a look on this page (especially before bashing unregistered guests):
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/online.php

Most visitors are unregistered guests, most page impressions are made by unregistered, most banners are viewed by unregistered. The mayority visitors are unregistered, you should give them an opportunity to post.

People are still able to read the messages. If they'd like to participate activly in the discussion, it's just a matter of registering.

The only thing required to register is a valid e-mail address. For the rest, you can just enter some invalid stuff. If you don't like to give out your e-mail address, visit http://www.spammotel.com - it's a free forwarding service that avoids giving your true e-mail address, and you can "dump" it once you receive spam.

Not that you'd have to worry about receiving spam from GnutellaForums, because the e-mail isn't used for that purpose here. It allows you to receive notifications of topic updates to which you've responded or created, or receive Private Message (PM) notifications. And if you don't like to receive any of those, it's a simple click of a button on the User CP (Control Panel).

The main reason, is that a number of unregistered people were blamed as a repeat offender of negative posts, while in fact some of them were completely different people. It made some mods a bit biased against unregistered users that way. But registering, everyone can have his her own identity, and mistakes like that would be less occuring.

When registering, you really don't have to worry about revealing your identity. As moderators, we know not much more than if you were an unregistered poster. The biggest difference, is that we can address you individually, instead of addressing all unregistered posters.

Thanks and I see.

one thing to think about: there are many many unregistered visiting this forums and if you patch vBulletin every unregistered needs to enter a name, you can see who is who. I think most unregistered are friendly and nice. :)

You don't even need to patch vBulletin for this. All you have to do is require registration to post :)

What is the problem? In my opinion, if you do not register yourself, you should not be allowed to post a message. In most bbs and ALL chat rooms you have to register if you want to see or post messenger.
Yes, most of the unregistered guests are very friendly and nice. But, we don’t know if that is the same person that was nasty in one post and nice in an other post is the same person.

statistics
 

well, don't forget blocking unregisterd (like me) means this forum also becomes less interesting, statisticaly. have a look on 'who's online' again and you will see how many good posts from various guests you'll miss. :)

Re: statistics
 

There is absolutely no doubt about that. But, take for example the Zeropaid forums. Nobody complains about registering (it is compulsory in ALL forums), and they all get on well.

Ivan
"In the dark we make a brighter light"

you always find worse examples and have a look how few visitors they have in their forums. also you are wrong, posting on their main page is everywhere free for guests!

www.gnutella.com is also free for guests?