I've tried it both ways (I'm talking about Threads registration here options
). I just let people make their own password and sign-up w/o having to confirm their email at first. Anyhow, I felt the same way that I didn't wan the registration to be a hassle. The problem w/ this method is that people sign up who don't ever log in once, and I think this is due to bots crawling the net.
Later on I turned email confirmation on and the registrations dropped. That way, I was reasonably certain that new users were real people and not computers.
Later on I added PhotoPost and got about a dozen people a day signing up, just to look at the photo galleries. They didn't participate in the forums, and I knew nothing about them because they never changed their profiles. I even commissioned the Registration Mod so that they would HAVE to fill out their profile during registration. I guess that can be considered a hassle, making them fill out all their info, but at least I get to know something about these people.
I've even gone so far to add the Auto-Group change mod so that people would have to write X number of messages in the forums in order to have access to all the galleries. I AM thinking about removing that requirement.
As far as hassles go, I think the only hassle for your users is perhaps not letting them pick their own password during regsitration. For some people, figuring out how to change their password may be a hassle, so why not let them pick the one they want when they register? So, making people confirm their email is NOT a hassle. Randomly generated passwords ARE a hassle.
