After witnessing the fate of an earlier topic, how about giving limited access to a person, whoever it might be, signing on as a guest. Just access to a forum which might be helpfull to a TR starter like troubleshooting and/or hardware and so on. Not the whole deal. Just thought might help. 

How about read but not post?  If visitors want to participate registering is simple.

IMHO registration will not stop unacceptable behaviour. The only solution I’ve ever seen work is to not go there even if some *** does and if you inadvertently step on toes, try to make it right.

This forum has been a useful and pleasant experience for me and I’ve interacted with some fine people who, given the opportunity, I think I’d enjoy meeting in person.

[quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]Ok, here’s my thought on this. I originally didn’t make registration mandatory because I wanted to give people a chance to “test out” the site and get comfortable with it before registering. Of course, it’s different now that we have a good group of established members now. Now, you can get around the login mess by enabling cookies. The cookie should last for a long time as the time out mode is really really long.

I can try restricting the entire site so that you have to be registered and see how it goes. Perhaps I need to start a poll for this. Or, I can get a show of hands here. What do you all think?

[quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]After mulling over it some more I’ve decided to keep things as they are for now. Drachen’s eloquently stated comments pretty much apply to the way I think. Also, for the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that many of the new members were guest posters for their first 1-5 posts and then they finally ended up registering. So, I think the process that we have currently works. It’s non-threatening and the people that really want to be apart of this community end up becoming a member.

I’m sure that those people who are having issues of being signed off of the site know that they can ask the other helpful members of this board for some tricks to keep yourself automatically signed in. If you can’t solve your cookie problem there’s always Roboform which can automatically sign you in if necessary.