Board Thread:Administrators Discussion/@comment-4811793-20130620225343/@comment-5454372-20130624020430

^In light of what Semanticdrifter just said there, I would suggest you guys start welcoming and encouraging repeat guests to make an account on here: that's what I usually do on the wiki I'm most active on, and the most common rationale I give is "so we can put a name to a face" for anons who seem keen on participating. As for how I recognise when it's the same anons who keep coming back, that's between a combination of their writing styles and their IP addresses (the latter of which is ironically the issue here).

If you start doing this now, you'll likely have a much better chance of retaining the anon contributors you currently have by encouraging them to make accounts: the idea is that if you make an effort to actively welcome new people as a collective community, then future newbies who come around and can't post will be more encouraged to sign up for an account and join if they see that you were welcoming towards guests while they could still post -- if you were that welcoming to a nameless person, how much more welcoming would you be to someone with a name and a face :)

Again, if you guys have already been doing that, then please don't mind this post. The gist of what I'm getting is that any solution which involves masking the identity of anons is too technically demanding to implement at this point, so it's best to move onto Plan B and think about how to convert your anon contributors into regulars with accounts.