Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4811793-20130620230822/@comment-961279-20130621081906

David231099 wrote: On one hand, this means there will be less vandals. On the other hand this is very stupid! Why should anons like Spydar have to suffer when they have done nothing wrong? I know that it looks like most vandals are anonymous users. But the reality is that if someone wants to vandalize, being required to create an account doesn't matter to them. And if they think that staying anonymous helps hide what they're doing, they don't know exactly what an IP address can reveal about them.

As to people "suffering", to use a Star Trek quote, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." Wikia has to do this to protect themselves. I'm sure they don't have millions of dollars just lying around to defend themselves against lawsuits if kids under 13 were hurt as a result of something that happened here. In situations like that, sometimes what a company has to do is to cut back on services or even go out of business.

I know you wouldn't want Wikia to have to close the Club Penguin Wiki because they couldn't afford to keep it running because they were spending that money in a lawsuit. And you wouldn't want them to close this wiki because they couldn't risk having any young kids show up here.

By requiring people to use accounts on a wiki like this, Wikia helps meet the needs of the many by ensuring this wiki can stay running. It also means that each person who creates an account joins in to help Wikia keep running because when they sign up, they have to say, "I am telling the truth when I provided my age". That was always there before, but now it will have even more weight to that statement.

It would be nice if these kinds of steps weren't necessary, but they are, just like it's necessary to teach kids to beware of strangers. At least one of the wikis I'm an admin on is also going to have the account requirment, so don't feel like that Club Penguin is being picked on or is all alone in this. Think of it as a way that we help keep Wikia running and we get to keep using a wiki that we like for free.