Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Why registration is bad and will make this board worse (a thoughtful analysis)

I'm no internet wizard either, but it seems to me the same as John notes. AOL has dynamic IPs, for example. I personally don't think registration has anything to do with IPs (although it could if they want to trace someone) in general, it's the email address they are checking, not your IP, and they only want a legitimate email address. You can have an email address and not even own a computer. I access my email addresses at home, at work, and when traveling all over the place, the email address doesn't reflect any particular ISP. I also don't think registration means they are going to somehow spend more time patrolling the boards for bad posts, they could have done that before, although they could "block" a particular name if they found a lot of posts from it they didn't like (and I am counting on that for some advertisers, actually). I am registered on a few boards that I care about, find useful and/or use a lot, and I use my registration name on those boards when logging on from a variety of computers, they don't check to see what IP you are when you "logon" with a given name and password. I suppose they think it will cut down on the junk a little, I don't know. I don't think this board was very bad in that regard, myself, other boards are a lot worse (including Lonely Planet). I think registration will cut down on the posts from newcomers--it remains to be seen how much. For example, I usually won't go to the trouble to register on any site if I don't intend to use it a lot. Some boards used to have registration and then got rid of it, like Frommers, so there must be disadvantages. I would especially think so in cases where you want to encourage dropin traffic, as opposed to those where the customer is getting something from you (like NYTimes). Fodors can measure traffic in other ways and they may be checking to see if traffic is down a lot after this, because I think that's what advertisers care about. I don't think there is much of an inner circle of longtime posters, but I don't know. There are a few people who complain a lot about this issue, but I don't know if they are talking to each other or not. I do think there are a lot of longtime posters (myself one) and some feel very proprietary about this board and how it operates (which I don't), but I think they are mainly operating as individuals, not that they are getting together in any group thought process. I don't know because I may not be in on it. A few times some usual anonymous xxx or something has made remarks about all the good people have gone off (because of how bad the posts are on Fodors, blah, blah) to some fantasy travel board with each other that is superior and I guess they talk to themselves about travel or something. I think that was fiction but I don't know what they are talking about, those posts have always sounded very immature. There have been 1-2 people who have tried to get people to go to some obscure uninteresting board where they perceived themselves as important and could dominate (independenttraveler, for example), but I don't think a lot of former regular Fodors posters have some secret board set up somewhere where they all talk to each other. It would be kind of odd if they did.