Quote Originally Posted by Alfa1 View Post
As a result, many vbulletin boards are blacklisted by hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol and others, without the admins knowing it. Its a huge problem, while few are aware. It affects your number of active members, how many successful registrants you have and therefore the growth and success of your site.
Of course, you could always just not require e-mail verification. That's what my site has done for a few years, since I got regular complaints about validation e-mails not arriving. It's not just sites being blacklisted, but also random false positives in spam filters, and even users just typing the wrong address. And e-mail verification is an extra step in registration, and you lose some users at every step. Registration should be as effortless as possible.

So personally, I wish vB would handle it better if the admin makes an e-mail address optional. It should tell the user during registration that an e-mail address is optional – last I checked it required an address but just didn't verify it. And it should allow users to verify their e-mail, if they want, but refuse to send any e-mail until the address is verified. All this is how MediaWiki works, and IMO it's a much better system if the admin makes e-mail optional (which granted, most probably don't).