A quick announcement here.
We used to allow unregistered users, those who have not confirmed their ELU account via email, to post on ELU. This has led to many, many issues. Just a few of these are complete abandonment of questions without ever any further engagement from the poster, orphaned migrations to other sites, the moderation team not being able to contact the user, a steady stream of low-quality questions from users currently blocked for the same in their main account using throwaway unregistered accounts, and being an easy spam target.
All this has been getting rather worse lately, as some of you yourselves have noticed and commented upon.
So following discussion of several of these issues privately with Stack Exchange's Community Management team, who had already run more detailed analyses on these accounts, the ELU moderators decided to ask the CMs to flip the switch, and they did so.
That means that from now on our site will require that brand new accounts first confirm their account via the normal email registration process before posting.
This doesn't interfere with web traffic and referrals because anyone can still read the site. They just need to have a registered account now to create a new post.
Per this MSE post, many SE sites have long done this same thing, not just us. See also this request from eight years ago. Even though eight years back the ELU community weighed in against making this very change, usage patterns have shifted so much since then that those answers don't work very well for our current environment, which those answerers back then could not have foreseen.
