A Great Suggestion

I understand the frustration but we are continually working on the server. We will not cut off viewing the forums to guests.

Forcing registration to post allows users to be accountable for their actions, tying their posts and IP's to their accounts.

Forcing registration to view posts does nothing, really. Some users will register, despite whatever misgivings they may have felt about it, and some won't. Most users who ever have to view the forum as a guest, say, because their school isn't accepting cookies from unapproved sites, will feel contemptuous. The rest will be excluded for no other reason than they didn't feel like registering.

It's nothing but a patchup job that depends on users not registering in order to reduce bandwith consumption+server load. If they actually registered, and merely never posted, it would not only not 'fix' anything, it would make things WORSE, due to more features being available to registered users that eat more server load.

To put it a different way, what's more valuable to a forum? A registered member that never posts or PM's, or a guest?
A registered member that only posts spam posts, or a guest?

Trick question. Nobody is.
Every person is a valued member of the community who we seek to reach out to and provide relevant, quality information to about Guild Wars. Whether they're an Ensign, an average poster, a 0-post lurker, or a guest, they're all welcome to be here.

On a somewhat related note, if you wanted to know a service we could cut out, reduce quite a bit of bandwith and server load, and make moderation a less stressful job for the staff; The sell forums.

But why're they still here, despite being the most troublesome of all forums?
Because it's a valuable service to the community.