[Toni]

I am new to this plugin and to running a forum. I am just a volunteer English teacher obsessed with WP.
My user count will be microscopic, a handful of people. (my ESL students)
Many of my users will not have email addresses, have not ever used PCs and do not have PCs at home – experience has shown me it is impractical to provide email initially.

Is there an option to register users without email addresses?
If I leave the forums open without registration – what are the potential issues, security or otherwise? If any?

(I do not know how to set up any WP registrations anyway!)
– WP 4.1/bbPress 2.5.4. MultiSite install.
– I have dedicated a MultiSite subsite to bbPress.
– I have Askimet and Conditional CAPTCHA https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-conditional-captcha/

Any suggestions or input about plugins, if this is a bad idea, etc. will be appreciated.

[Robin W]

Wordpress insists that you ether an email address, but you only need enter something that looks valid.

So for instance for my non existent test users, I simply create their accounts with a dummy unique email address such as

testuser1@qhqhttyweyywttw.com
testuser2@qhqhttyweyywttw.com

Then just give you users their username and initial password, and ask them to change the password.

Once that is done, there are no additional security risks in setting them up this way, as the only risk is of they click ‘lost password’ and that will send an email to the (hopefully!) non-existent user email above, hence the horrible email address above.

You could even disable password reset

http://wpsnipp.com/index.php/functions-php/remove-the-lost-your-password-link/

and stop that happening

[Toni]

Excellent. I appreciate the clear info and idea. Thank you very much.
Cheers!

[Robin W]

you’re welcome !