I’m totally with you on this but maybe for different reasons.
People are impatient and on the internet, they want it NOW. I’ve got hundreds of never logged on sign ups plus I paid good money on AdWords to acquire them.
With emailed passwords, there’s 2 weak points. Your mail server, and the new members mail server. If the email doesn’t arrive within their expectations of time, they register a new username. If either mail server experiences an outage, there are 2 registrations on the memberlist that ‘Never’ logged on and aren’t likely because “that site sucks”.
A registration form, customizable fields user chooses their own password and a captcha in the form. Now that makes sense to me.
It would actually be best if upon entering the registration info and some sort of captcha, the user was automatically logged in and returned to the point where they hit the “Register” button.
People are lazy. They don’t want to sign up, wait for the email, copy and paste the password (because good luck remembering “D7e98DF”), sign in, and then return to the spot that made them register in the first place.
I know this would probably cause some technical issues and would not be the most secure, but I think it would greatly increase user attach rate.
I put a ticket into trac about this a few months ago.
https://trac.bbpress.org/ticket/779
Changing the way it functions is not too difficult but it does have to be done via the core so unfortunately I can’t address it via a plugin. At least I dont think I can, not easily.
Oh and forget a captcha ever being built into bbPress/WordPress. It will have to be done via plugin with a hook. Because the moment thousands of people have the same standardized captcha, that’s the moment it will be analysed to be broken by bots. As a plugin the method can be changed on a whim and vary from site to site easily. Besides, I’d rather have people do simple math than an awkward captcha.
