Malone should let anonymous users post comments now, and confirm their email address later

[Jason Spiro]

It would be great if not-logged-in users could post a comment now and confirm their email address later. This would encourage more users to post comments because it would remove the burden of registering in Launchpad.

How it would work: It would work just like the process suggested for bug 50653: Malone would prompt them for their email address, and if they wanted, they could enter their name too.

See also related bug #50653: Malone should support craigslist-style anonymous bug reporting.

[Vikram Dhillon (dhillon-v10)]

I don't think that this is a really good idea, this might increase spamming and then we might have to use moderation. We have already seen recent reports of people spamming bugs and answers which is pretty annoying.

[Jason Spiro (jasonspiro)]

Vikram, what do you mean by "spamming"? Do you mean "posting ads for online prescription drug stores and such"?

See also bug 50653 comment 6. mpt writes, "Ubuntu already has more bug reports than the QA team can cope with, so possibly they would rather not have this mechanism any more, while small project's like balrok's would like it. Perhaps whether this is possible should be part of a project-specific Bugs setting for ease-of-reporting vs. amount-of-information-reported." Maybe such a setting could affect whether a project would get the functionality I, too, am requesting. :)

[Vikram Dhillon (dhillon-v10)]

@Jason: Its agreeable that small projects could take advantage of this :) but check this out:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/45419
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/32990
https://bugs.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/153962

These are just some examples of people creating launchpad-profiles and then spamming, which then creates quite a bit of work for an admin to go and delete that project/answer/bug-comment which is a "spam" Now if we can find an alternative (one that doesn't involve moderation) we can use this technique and it indeed would be very helpful. I think this topic needs to be discussed in a little more detail probably on the mailing list?

[Jason Spiro (jasonspiro)]

It makes sense that this should be discussed on the mailing list before it's implemented. But I'm no longer as interested in this issue as I was in 2007 when I filed it. So I don't volunteer to be the one to start a mailing list thread about this. :)

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I'm marking this as a dup of the other referenced bug because I see the change in order as simply an implementation different / different objects to apply it to.