Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-3390396-20130704105258

First of all, you all should read this blog. Here's a summary: Due to new additions to the COPPA law that prevents collection of private info of children younger that 13, (earlier, "private info" didn't include IPs. The new addition has included IPS, and Wikia collects the IPs of anonymous contributors.) Wikia has disabled anonymous editing in wikis, whose topics, it thinks, cater to a younger audience. I didn't pay much attention to it since I thought our wiki wouldn't be on the list, but unfortunately, seems it is (just log out and try editing, would you). And since Wikia's an American company, it has to obey American laws.

Now, I think disabling of anonymous contributing will cause a serious damage to a potential community. Most active users start out as anonymous users. I will quote User:Semanticdrifter (from the aforementioned blog: Now that the change has gone into effect, many of you will have seen a notice on your home wiki, which was included because it was flagged as being directed to children. If you feel this flag was an error and your community was either wrongly included or wrongly left out, please start an open discussion on a forum, message wall, or blog post at your community. Try to have your community members weigh in with reasons why they think the wiki is not actually directed to children, or why it is. While I can’t guarantee we will agree, we are certainly willing to listen to arguments that your wiki doesn’t actually belong in the category. You can send a link to the conversation to us via Special:Contact and we will take a second look.

What do you think? 