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[uk_john2005]

I find the forums a little unweildly when looking for answers to questions for a particular game, or advise on whether the game is good or not. It would seem that a lot of people, mostly unregistered, do not read previous messages and just ask questions that have already been asked and answered. Unregistered users are also more likely to be insulting, and personally I do not trust their statements as much as I do registered users.

In general I find that unregistered users are more likely to be the ones asking 'how do you use DosBox' or 'I have no sound in XP' when 20 previous messages have said to solve this problem use DosBox. Quite often an unregistered user will ask a question that already been answered and when he/she is told to use DosBox comes back and says 'where do I get DosBox?' when someone (usually a registered user) gives the Abandonia link to download DosBox the unregistered user comes staight back and says 'Got DosBox, how do I use it?'.

I find I have to work a lot harder on Abadonia to find information in the forum because of this repetition of question and answer. Sometimes the question is asked and answered over 20 times in a 500 message thread!

Throughout the forum there must be 1,000's of messages asking how to use DosBox or VDMSound, etc and I would bet 95% of them are from unregistered users. It is a waste of sever space, it makes using Abandonia more frustrating than it should and it makes me a little angry that users are willing to just some to the forum to get their questions answered without giving anything back.

Having to register to post a message would mean users would have to be more serious and involved. Also Abandonia could delete registrations that had not been used in 3 or 6 months, so that infrequent posters would have to re-register.

It would not stop what I have mentioned above, but it would cut it down. It's ridiculous that we have threads that are over 1000 big that could easily have 75% of the messages deleted for repetition!

If the threads were smaller, I believe users would be more willing to look through the whole thread to see if their question has been already answered.

Anyway. I have created a simple poll for you to give your point of view.

(Of course, it's up to Abandonia to decide on whether users will need to register in future, etc.)