> I have been quite surprised to encounter a number of people who resist using the forums or the issue trackers to ask questions, file bug reports, or make feat

> I have been quite surprised to encounter a number of people who resist using the forums or the issue trackers to ask questions, file bug reports, or make feature requests. Usually their reasoning boils down to it being too inconvenient to create an account on redmine.stoutner.com. Joel Spolsky had a solution to this issue in 2003: Eliminate the registration requirement on support forums. Quoting him: —- Q. Why don’t you have a registration scheme to eliminate rude posters? A. As I explained earlier, the goal of the forum is to make it easy to post. (Remember, the software was written for tech support.) Registration schemes eliminate at least 90% of the people who might have posted, and in a tech support scenario, those 90% are going to call my toll free number. Besides, I don’t think registration would help. If somebody is being abusive, it doesn’t help to ban them, they can trivially reregister. The idea of improving the community by requiring registration is an old one, and it’s appropriate, I think, for the Echo/Well type of conferences where you’re creating a network of people as much as you’re discussing a topic, and you charge people cash money to belong. But requiring registration does NOT improve the quality of the conversation or the average quality of the participants. If you look closely at the signal-to-noise ratio on the Joel on Software forum, you might start to notice that the noisiest people (i.e. the people who post the most words while contributing the fewest ideas) are often the long time, hard core members who visit the forum every ten minutes. These are the people who feel the need to chime in with a “I agree with that” and replies to Every Single Topic even when they haven’t got an original thought to contribute. And they would certainly register. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities-with-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti...