Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-24155515-20150724205020


 * What does anonymous editing bring to your communities now, if it’s available there?
 * Okay, so the only wiki I edit on Wikia is COPPA disabled, and I wasn't around before the disabling, so I can't speak to this from experience, only from looking back. From doing that, I see some constructive and some nonconstructive edits.


 * Why don’t anonymous editors create accounts?
 * (Discounting vandals (which I don't have the clout to say that even a majority of IPs are these)) Lots of reasons:
 * Security concerns, including potentially needing to edit from shared, unsecure computers that may or may not have keyloggers on them
 * Not wanting the "tied-down" feeling of an account
 * Only wishing to make one edit or something
 * Not knowing how
 * I once knew someone with a static IP (as opposed to a periodically changing dynamic one) who didn't have an account because they didn't want the same password for all the sites they used but also had a horrible memory and so tried to avoid having passwords wherever possible (and having a static IP helped them to still have a presence since it didn't change)... that's a rarity though.
 * Privacy concerns, not wanting people to find them on the internet
 * Not wanting it connected to FB and/or their email


 * What would motivate them to create accounts, besides disabling anonymous editing altogether?
 * Making the reasons for their not making accounts moot (good motivation)
 * Making being an IP editor literal purgatory (bad, bad motivation)
 * Making clear to IP editors, in a clear/noticeable but unobtrusive way, what they can get with an account; this won't motivate everyone to make accounts, because some people just don't want them for good reason


 * For those of you in communities who plan to disable anonymous editing, or if that’s happened on your community already, please let us know about how the change affected your community.
 * I do not know how much of this is a result of the popularity of the wiki's subject matter decreasing and how much is from lack of anons, but nowadays, I feel I'm the only consistently active, constructive user to the wiki (yes, there are other users who check in regularly at least for a look-see, but very few who actively edit anymore); we occasionally see swells of account creation (like, as in, 2 in one day or something)--often they've registered to make a one-off edit or two to an article's comments and then are never seen again.


 * Was it beneficial?
 * At this point, I can't even really say. In fact, I'm curious as to Wikia's COPPA restriction policy and what types of information they're collecting from anonymous users that make it impossible to allow anonymous editing on child-subject-focused wikis (I can find no pages to aid in this understanding), but then, that has little to do with the price of tea in China. I will say it both allows for putting a name to a face and for making it more difficult to identify IP hoppers who might not have bothered to make an account to vandalize had the anonymous editing been an option.


 * Was there a change in activity level immediately?
 * Wasn't there; can't answer


 * What was the level of activity a few months after the change?
 * I came in a few months after the lockdown, if the date on Community Corner's message about it is any confirmation. There were maybe about 10-50 active users at the time? Maybe? Article editing seemed to be dwindling around that time, IIRC.

66.249.93.228 wrote: Hiddenlich wrote: Mario360PS wrote: Or you could actually make Wikia not have you need to sign up and email is optional. And all they need to put in is there username. Or you could tell ips to sign up on all wikias so we can prevent vandals, and the ips are also exposed get there address and it will be easy for some one to look up there data. There is a reason for why there is an email linked to your account. It's for recovery. If you forgot your password, or if someone broke into your account, it would be very hard to retrieve your account. How come you dont need an email account to edit Wikipedia?

They just don't require it. They allow you to enter it to gain access to some actions (like emailing other users, something Wikia has disabled IIRC), and they give you the caveat that without it they can't recover your password. But in contrast, they're likely to treat a compromised account as if the user's email may be compromised as well--oftentimes if you don't have a security hash allowing people to find a foolproof way to prove it's you, they may block your account until it's clear you're in control again, sometimes even if you are in control and have reset the password.

Callofduty4 wrote: Fewer ads. Especially those skin-takeover ads. If I was in a position of an anonymous user who kept getting served skin-takeover ads, I would totally make an account to stop seeing them (browser extensions such as Adblock set aside - not everyone has access to these).
 * What would motivate them to create accounts, besides disabling anonymous editing altogether?

Are you sure this actually happens? I regularly get skin takeover ads when in the default skin. I mean, I typically use Monobook due to those ads and/or that skin's effect on my computer and functioning (I get distracted in the default skin and my computer likes to start hissing and using CPU when I'm in there), and perhaps that might even be the reason I'm still served those, but I regularly get them when I have to force display of the default skin, both if I use the temporary URL way or through my prefs.