Forum registration

[digicamhelp]

I run a very small forum. Most people ask a question, mods answer them and few visitors ever otherwise particapte or interact. They rarely don't return uless they have another question. The board is intentionally structured this way as I'm not trying to develop a community.

I don't require registration, though about 35% of participants have registerd. Are there compelling/legal reasons why I should require it?

Thank you.

[rogerd]

If you aren't getting spammed , and there's no intention of building a community, it's probably OK to run without forced registration for now. I'd monitor that, and if you get abusive posting, one poster impersonating another, etc., then it might be time to switch.

[team]

So far so good. Only one or two spams. Thanks for the advice!

[Neo541]

I ran for about 6 months with no registration. It really helped to get some posts in the forum, sort of get the ball rolling. Thn switched to registering for 2 years, and last year I switched to admin approval to deal with spamming issues.

[rogerd]

If your forum uses non-standard URLs and doesn't have stuff like "powered by ___" in footers, titles, etc., you'll be able to stay off the spam radar longer. That's one advantage of using an obscure forum package.

[Neo541]

If your forum uses non-standard URLs and doesn't have stuff like "powered by ___" in footers, titles, etc., you'll be able to stay off the spam radar longer. That's one advantage of using an obscure forum package.

Exactly, good point. I now use vBulletin, pay to remove copyrights, and rewrite the url's. We used to get quite a few searches done specifically for key phrases in Phpbb before I switched.