I had a back-and-forth email conversation with Semanticdrifter about alternatives, but I haven't had time to summarize those emails recently. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

^ that I will wait for before attempting to rgue their as no good alternative as I am sure I dont know all of them.

The possibilities are near-infinite.

I had a bit of a discussion with him as well, he said basically that the birth date idea would be too expensive to implement, which I have mixed sentiments about.

Finally, I'm gonna summarize the email conversation for those who are still interested.

On June 24, I sent an email through Special:Contact to Wikia staff regarding HoT's idea of the checkbox idea. I had not known at that time that the checkbox idea had been turned down already by both Wikia and by COPPA, so that was the idea that I mostly focused on. However, I did mention that Wikia could alter that idea in any way they liked in order to make it more comply with COPPA, then gave examples of how they might alter it such as prompting the anon to type his age or birthday instead of checking a box, or make it so that one's computer would recognize an anon who had already checked a box/typed his birthday/typed his age so that anon would no longer have to do any of those things upon further contributions.

Semanticdrifter replied to this first email on June 25, at which time he first told me what I had found out a little too late: that the checkbox idea was impossible. His next sentence really got me worried: "The age gate, if implemented, would have to be done in a neutral fashion that doesn't encourage users to lie." This would mean that many of the ideas that we had already come up with would have to be more heavily modified. He went on to say that a popup asking for the date of birth would be "closer to passing muster with the FTC, but to do so in a neutral fashion it would end up looking alot like the user registration portal." There's that neutrality again. Next he said, "You yourself mentioned it could get tedious. I would personally argue that making anons go through that every time they comment or edit would create more of a barrier to entry than doing so one time to create an account. It also would require some significant engineering resources." That engineering resources comment is not one that I believe we nor Wikia should be most worried about -- if we want anonymous contributors again, then the difficulties of engineering resources should not be made a priority. However, I do agree about one thing: Wikia can't just splurge their money reserves on whatever undesirable issue that comes up. If money is the problem keeping Wikia from doing this engineering, then who are we to say "get that money and do what we tell you"?

My email reply on that same date pointed out once more the fact that cookies could be used to recognize anonymous contributors who have already typed their dates of birth/typed their ages/(this one sound silly, but it could work) typed up something that looked similar to the user registration portal. If that anonymous contributor really wanted to stay anonymous, then he would not mind typing up something similar to the registration portal once in his wiki life. However, he and I both agreed that doing any one action over and over again would probably just repel those anons who really wished to stay anonymous. This is also the email where I asked his permission to share any info uncovered in the email conversation with Avatar Wikians.

His final reply came on the twenty-seventh. The reply to the cookie idea, this time, was very positive and excitement-worthy imo: "The idea of using a cookie to make sure that the anonymous user only has to input their date of birth every so often is a good one. We looked at an idea very similar to that in the planning stages for compliance. It is possible, and as long as we took some basic precautions is a strong possibility for allowing anonymous contributions. It would require some work from us on the back end to implement."

His next sentence confirmed my fears about the costs of the aforementioned "engineering resources". Furthermore, the following sentences gave me more insight into the process that they used to choose the blanket ban instead of whatever other options they had been considering. I'll just quote it all since it's pretty substantial: "Part of our reasoning for disabling anonymous edits is that it is the simplest path to complying with COPPA. We looked at creating technical tools and weighed the resource costs of developing them against the fact that registration is already a useful alternative, and that tool is already built out.

"We also considered the fact that we receive many requests from wikis to disable anonymous editing.

"We also looked at some high profile wikis that have managed to thrive with this feature disabled.

"Given all that, we chose to focus on the blanket disable for wikis in the category."

While I can understand why money for those resources could become an issue, the fact that registration is an alternative does not cut it for me. Some anons have reasons for not getting accounts, so the registration portal may not be able to help them. The fact that many wikis get requests to disable anonymous editing applies very little to us at all, considering there are very few users in this thread (and therefore on the wiki) who were for the blanket ban, so our wiki has no problem with anonymous editors. Although some wikis have "managed to thrive" quite easily without anonymous contributors (as I'm sure our wiki will), this place will not, imo, be nearly as alive without the anons. However, the fact that when an anonymous contributor tries to do anything immediately prompts the user to log in or sign up is a good idea, since an anon who really wants to edit may not care about his anonymity anymore if it means he can't edit or comment, etc.

He left off with this final thought: "I think it's fair to say that we were somewhat surprised by the passion with which the Avatar community has defended anonymous editing, and we are definitely taking note. We do realize that every community is different, and we can see that yours feels strongly about this issue. I'll definitely keep this proposal and similar ones in mind as we review our approach in the future."

Lol he saved responses from my conversation.

Here's my biggest problem with the cost argument:

Someone pointed out on the COPPA blog, I should say quite fairly, that it was a ridiculous mistake for Wiki to ID anonymous editors with IP addresses in the first place. Wikis are the only place I know of that do this, every other corner of the internet that allows anonymous contribution uses a function where you input your name & E-mail address, or assigns you a random title, such as "Guest12345."

Wiki SHOULD focus its efforts on changing its program so that it doesn't use IP addresses as an identifier, because regardless of how anyone feels about this, that's probably going to keep coming back to bite them in the future.

That's a fair point.

Similar to the "discus" system. That would save the trouble of requiring an sign-up like we have today, and at the same time the previous system, where nonies end up revealing their IP addresses.

Thank you.

Disqus uses OpenID for that. I already suggested Wikia to use the OpenID extension for MediaWiki.

Like I didn't see this coming.