That represents 80% of users. Typical person always thinks his/her problem or suggestion is unique. Typical person always thinks his/her time is precious in contrast to other people's time which is of course free, in their opinion. This is how things work in this world.

If the forum was registered only it means heaps of maintenance too. Because people don't want to use registered email addresses. They want to use other addresses, different from their registered address. So suddenly you get daily 10+ of emails like "please subscribe, change my address and so on." that you have to verify etc.

Yahoo was for registered users at some point and I am still receiving tons of subscribe requests everyday even today when it is closed.

Also you can not practically distinguish genuine trial users from the others. If genuinely trial user is rejected any help he/she will not buy. That is not good.

Trial users will have to have their questions answered. If not here, then somewhere else. Which pretty much always ends up on email support, which is bad, because no one else can see the response.

It is also not true that registered users are somehow magically "better" in terms of "resource usage", as even today I got the basic question from user who is registered something like 10 years and the question is answered in KB for 10 years and being quoted twice a week on this forum.

When you face real-world customer care problems you just face the "true face of humanity". It is not without reason that customer service is considered among the worst jobs one can ever have. Not because it is difficult but because of attitude of the "other side". It is side effect of "customer is always right" paradigm that is so popular. It might be true if you are buying tomatoes, but for highly technologically complex things like software it can't be further from truth because customer typically is ignorant when it comes to new software, yet he/she always thinks he/she is "right" because they were told the old mantra.

I have build AmiBroker for my own use, not to sell it to anybody. I needed a trading software and no offering on the market was able to cope with what I needed. AmiBroker was released to the public because several people asked me to do so. As it turned out lots of people found other platforms lacking as I did, and they choose AB. AmiBroker was meant as powerhouse not as iPod-like toy that everyone could use. If it was designed for the masses it would need to get simplified to iPod level. I am programmer, not customer service man. Customer service is not my favorite thing to do. Still I was servicing people for 20+ years.

There are no easy solutions. Even if you hire 10 people they ALL come back to you asking questions as NOBODY on this planet knows what I know about AmiBroker. And as long as all those answers are kept private nobody can benefit from shared knowledge.

Open community forum is extremely valuable because:

1. If I answer one person, all the others see the answer and there is a chance some may be having same issue solved by this one answer

2. On numerous occasions forum members provided perfect answer even before I have seen the post so not only the answer is delivered faster but it saved some of my time. In a number of times the answers given by others were more elaborate, more detailed and better written then I could deliver in limited time

3. Other users may have better understanding of newbie talk and provide better answers for newcomers. I sometimes find that I speak "different language". Things that are obvious for me, are not obvious for everybody else, so I not always dig into the details required by newcomers. Other users may have better ways to express things clearly to people without programming background.

As of now I am extremely pleased with this Discourse based forum. It works 100x better than Yahoo. It proved to handle programming questions very nicely in clear format. Its presentation is amazingly good. It is fully mobile friendly. The participation is great. User-submitted answers are in their majority awesomely good.

I was reluctant to move to 'classic' web-based forum like phpBB, but Discourse is in separate class of its own and I am glad with the decision to move to it.