Actually, it isn’t. It’s quite smart. It prevents those with an agenda from hijacking the board and using it as a platform to spread their views to a general and unsuspecting public, thereby giving those views a legitimacy and audience they might otherwise lack. Forcing them to register means those who read them will be more familiar with them and with their biases.

You may have noticed how much fewer one-trick ponies now post here, and how those that do post less frequently. Most of them are smart enough to figure out they can no longer use the board as their private propaganda platform, so they’ve gone somewhere else.