Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-108.18.242.59-20150810202748

Coming from a user that was highly active on a small but very active wikia that had anonymous editing disabled (by admin request) since around the middle of 2014:

For us, ultimately, it helped. I think people felt better about not having to register to participate in the discussions on our wikia (I certainly did before I got an account), and the activity level went down, and I'm sad about that, but...

For a wikia as small as ours, we got a bunch of trolls. These trolls trolled us in our discussions, not on our wikia pages (for the most part). The discussion trolls seemed to be the type that didn't want to make accounts but were more than happy to keep changing IPs. I'm not an admin, but I get the impression that since there were far more trolls that didn't bother with making accounts, it's much easier for the admins to block the trolls that dared to make accounts and to block their IP addresses from making accounts than it was to keep chasing down the trolls that hopped from IP address to IP address.

It really depends on the situation. I really hope the admins of each wikia only disable anonymous contributions if they truly feel the need to.
 * We had a small community, so we didn't have many admins
 * We had a frustrating quantity of trolls (especially since we were already a small community) that did not dare to make accounts
 * The admins didn't request for anonymous contributing to be disabled until this problem had gotten really, really bad; it was at a "normal" level of bad for a few months, and then it just suddenly got worse and worse until it degenerated into name-calling and intelligence insults (notably with the word "retard"--yeah, that bad)
 * These trolls also targeted discussions rather than pages... I feel like there's a difference there, although I can't say exactly what it is
 * The users that were already registered on our wikia were doing a fine job of updating the information pages (our wikia's about a phone game) because it's really, really, really easy to get information about the game and some of our already-registered users already knew how to get the information... so unfortunately, by the time the problem with our trolls had almost gotten out of hand, the average anonymous contributor would only participate in discussions about the game
 * It seems like most people came onto our wikia for information anyway because it's pretty damn reliable for what's basically a fan-made database, especially when the game had no official (public/user-friendly/etc) database of its own as far as I could tell

I'm sad that we lost some of our community when we shut down anonymous contributions, but I think that it was worth it for us. And when an admin on the wikia posted a thread saying that anonymous comments were disabled, people rejoiced, with some saying that we had been needing it for a while. We had users registering regularly after anonymous contributions were disabled, too; I don't know how many were discouraged from joining us, but certainly not everyone became discouraged. In fact, we got quite a few new users considering how small our community was.