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Comment by Simucal | Hacker News Reader

Just be careful with your account in that state. Stackoverflow only knows your account by a cookie right now. You can't log into it from another machine or if you happen to clear your cookies you won't be able to log back in.

So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.

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well, as long as you provide a valid email (we don't check) you can do an account recovery to reinstate your cookie via email. The main limitation of being unregistered is that you can't ever vote on anything -- but you DO accrue other non-voting privileges through reputation like regular users.

Why don't you let unregistered users vote?

That would probably make the system more susceptible to gaming by spammers.

How does forcing registration help? The main barrier is that you need to answer a couple of questions and get upvotes before you can upvote others.

SO probably doesn't want too many unregistered users floating around. Also, one of success metrics for an Q&A site is the number of registered users. So, it does make sense to force users to go through almost painless process of registering before they really start engaging in the site.

I'm guessing (don't know for sure here) its an anti-spam measure...

I have a post I made before I registered my account. How do I tie that post into my existing account now, or can I only "import" old posts during registration? That's a disappointment. :/

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