Board Thread:Administrators Discussion/@comment-4811793-20130620225343/@comment-5384369-20130622140535

I have to disagree with some of the arguments given. I mean, even though at times, anons can be rude and annoying, that's the same thing with actual registered users here. So, we can't just assume that ALL of the anons are annoying and are just here to ruin the wiki, because I know, and almost everyone should know, that 75% of the anons aren't bad.

Also, it's not like this wiki is vandalized each and every day. It's normally about one user who wants to mess with us. And those problems are quickly fixed by, either, other users, or admins. Maybe there are a few loose stragglers that we forget, or maybe we just don't get to it in time, but we do try to make this wiki as comfortable as we possibly can.

So, in my opinion, although anons are the majority of people who vandalize, first of all, there aren't that many anons who actually edit, so by technicality their good to bad ratio of editing is easily able to tip. Secondly, it's not like one bad edit/comment causes the Wiki to go in total chaos. If a fight ensues in the comments, normally the problem is resolved within 30 minutes (at the most) if an admin is there, or in really bad cases, it takes a while longer. If it's editing, it takes the amount of time for a user to click on the history of that page, click the "undo" button, and hit publish.

Although I do agree with following federal law, most people have to admit that majority of the people will leave.

You look at the Auslly page, and a lot of the comments are anons, or, now, the Talk like Crazy blog post, a lot of those people are anonymous. When we told people no irrelevant comments, then a whole boatload of people left the wiki to go talk to others somewhere else. We were lucky to find a place where they can talk before we lost more people.

I can't really see that many disadvantages in ratio to advantages. Yes, vandalism may go down as well as drama and what not, but we could possibly lose some very nice people and helpful editors. We also could end up losing some USERS here, as well. I know a lot of people here who just comment with other users and anons. They don't edit either. So losing anons could potentially end up making this wiki lose some users here. So I have to say, losing some people over a little thing that could stop about 10% of the vandalism caused by anonymous users is not worth it.

I may be looking at this biased, because I'm an admin, and I actually want the best for all the users here, but I don't see what the point of some of this is. Although

Anons just become users, but with another name. It’s practically the same thing.

I mean, yes, doing this will be following federal law, but what happens after that? The people who normally just talk who actually might stay, do what? The anons who actually stay and get an account do what? The anons who vandalize just get an account and continue to vandalize. But, according to our guidelines, admins can't handle the situation until it occurs again. We can only give them a warning unless it's really bad. So that only makes it harder to deal with these situations, because we can’t just block them if they’re registered users, because that is not the way we want run our wiki. Also, just getting an account do not ensure that the new editing users, who were once anons, are now 13 years of age.

I feel like doing this just tightens the hold admins and staff have. I know admins talked about how much power we should/can have over other users an anons, and we agreed that this Wiki does not want the admins to become corrupt with power, and it’s become more of a monarchy and dictatorship than having equality on the wiki. We like the fact that on this wiki, you have more freedom to be able to do things, and a lot of people on here agree.

Also, wiki staff did say this wasn’t a “slam at anon editors”, and I think that’s where people have been heading. Reading over the page from the link, most of the criteria on there is handled by this wiki. Although there are a few things that this wiki lacks, I don’t think that cutting off anon editors is the best path to take, as there is more than one possible solution to the problem.