Thanks very much for the reply. Topix has an analysis at http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numbers.html http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anon

Thanks very much for the reply. Topix has an analysis at http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numbers.html http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numb... of the effects of allowing "anonymous" (no registration, but still with an alias) comments. The results were the percent of abuse didn't change either way since trolls and the like have lots of free time to grab a public email account, but no-registration greatly increased the amount of contribution, and possibly the quality since professionals with limited time and high quality contributions are perhaps less likely to deal with the rigamarole of registration. Topix does still have a lot of bad comments, but it's more the nature of a small town political board and so attracts a lot of gossip and low IQ people. I think a better design is HN/Reddit where one has to register but email (with confirmation if presented) is optional in the registration and all registering does is validate the user with a captcha and group their posts so they can be found and maintained (edited/deleted) by the user. I think that topix would be well served in fact to make the slight adjustment to switch to hn/reddit style. Of course both reddit and HN are notable for having virtually no noticeable spam and being relatively free from abuse especially compared to boards with registration like yahoo news discussions. Reddit HN and topix all do have a comment feedback mechanism though so that may provide social feedback regarding appropriate comments. These mechanisms do have a weakness though in that they are often used to punish unpopular points of view even when reasonably presented. OK, so that's on the topic of the social effects of registration methods. I also want to talk about the value and tech implementation of anonymity on such a site but I'll start that in a new comment so as to segregate these.