Great advice, thanks. I'll have to see what my school's policy is on that.

Or just do it, and ask for forgiveness later, as necessary. Your chance of being "caught" in a medium-to-large lecture is pretty low.

Most school charge roughly 50% of regular tuition rates to audit a course (attend lectures without earning credits.) They will usually allow you to complete all the coursework and get feedback as part of the auditing arrangement. Getting caught attending lectures without being enrolled can have implications beyond just being kicked out...you're essentially "stealing" an education. They can charge you with theft or criminal trespass. As someone who has a criminal record for trespassing, I'd advise you to just enroll in any course you really want to attend ;-)

Interesting. I guess I shouldn't have been so flippant.

Agreed. Or just ask the professor. If I were a professor I'd be ecstatic if someone wanted to sit in on a lecture just to learn, not for credits.

However I've also had great professors who would allow it because they feared the students wouldn't be fully committed since they weren't obligated to do assignments and exams.

correction: would not allow it

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm pretty sure I have an old Dell laptop laying around somewhere, so I'll have to give that first recommendation a shot this weekend!

In my opinion the more hurdles you present the more users you drive away.

There are legitimate reasons for introducing hurdles like requiring registration, requiring activation e-mails, etc. Ask yourself whether the benefits of activating outweigh the potential downsides. If you're requiring activation e-mails to prevent bots from signing up, how significant of an impact will those bots have on other users? On a forum it may be pretty significant, as the site can be flooded with unwanted posts. There are other cases where a bot signing up would really have no substantive impact on a user, because they wouldn't be inconvenienced by the bot.

That's a rather roundabout answer, but it effectively boils down to this: you should remove every unnecessary barrier between your user and your site. I consider an unnecessary barrier something that doesn't improve the quality of the site and/or the user experience.

Agreed. There are a number of cases where a valid, authenticated email is a requirement to use the system (for instance, when other users will be using that email to find and link to you). In those cases, an activation email is unavoidable.

Daniel