Well OK. I was trying to be slightly diplomatic in public reasoning. Why is it that every time I try to be kind, and diplomatic, the worst possible assumptions are made, and my attempt at diplomacy about something actually results in more harm than help to me? This is some kind of black cosmic humor, I swear.
In reality, my reasoning for the registration was like this: Someone defending a person flamed on the fever board suggested privately that without registration, search engines could pick up content here, and gee wouldn't it be unfair if insults about that person were available through a web search someday?
I hadn't stopped to think when setting up the forum that there might be some reason to click the option to require registration.
We are trying NOT to be censoring here, but sometimes that means if something isn't legal-level libel (and the person is not known to be some kind of psycho-stalker from elsewhere on the internet--I won't suffer the indignities those sorts can cause in our attempt to sponsor free speech here), we have to let it stand, or we end up interfering with personal expression, and we LIKE the people on TKR--we want people to be honest, even if it is NOT politically correct--to be comfortable here, we don't want people to feel like TKR would interfere with normal conversation.
So we try to drop things to the fever board instead of deleting, and we have a wizop council that votes on anything major, and we try to mitigate things and encourage lots of positive discussion as alternative to any bad stuff.
I pointed this out. The response was that to people being insulted, the fever board probably seems PLENTY public to them, hahaha!--and if picked up by engines (many, and more all the time, now archive dynamic content), such things could live on in perpetuity.
I admitted that did seem slightly unfair.
I figured if we had registration, we'd also know how many were reading (info for those posting here). Since it's easy, fast, free, and allows people to remain totally anonymous, I didn't think it'd be any big deal.
But the person himself that was being pleaded for and I thought I was defending, has (ironically) publicly posted on his own board it is some "ploy" I switched TKR to registration mode. Well gee. OK. Never mind then!
There are already some great people here, and some really interesting threads. I apologize if I briefly thought free/alias-allowed registration might be a good idea for TKR. Seemed reasonable at the time. Guess not. I have taken it off now, so it's public again.
PJ
