probably as a defense against sock puppets
I think
it's more to do with defence against comment spam. I know of several other small
to medium size forums which use also use manual account creation to try to
filter out spammers. A lot of spammers use bots to automatically sign up in
forums. If you use a non-standard sign up process, they don't bother creating a
special sign-up bot just for your site.
Spammers will post link spam
to try to boost their client's Google ranking. It's called SEO ("search engine
optimization"). Groklaw is set up so that Google doesn't index the comments, but
the spammers don't care. It's spam after all. They just fire out thousands of
spam messages and hope to get lucky on a few of them.
Google is
currently the subject of complaints in the EU by a group of spammers ("shopping
networks" in this case) who are trying to force them on the grounds of "fair
search" to stop filtering them out in searches. It's big business, believe it or
not. A lot of it is driven by "legitimate" commercial web sites who pay SEO
companies to try to boost their Google ranking. Sites like Groklaw would get
absolutely hammered by SEO spammer companies if they let just anyone sign up
without verification.
A sock puppet would just register a new Hotmail
account anyway instead of using their "real" e-mail address, so this policy
would have little effect on them.
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