Should people be authenticated before they are allowed to post in any particular category?

You are now proposing censorship. The hilarious part is you would fail your own test. 😂

It wouldn't work, and if it did, you wouldn't get to post much.

No because not only would be a logistical nightmare, an issue of basic right to speech issues - who gets to be the arbiter of who is an expert or not? That's very political.

It would not work for SW. It does for other platforms, like stackoverflow, where the expertise is organically regulated through a voting system and accumulation of points.

This place is not about expertise. We are here to interact with people who are in some nebulous and varying sense natives of a number of different worlds. The only expertise required is the ability to make basic use of some kind of computer.

The categories are just an artefact of the owners of the site's need to cause Google to drive viewers to the site; most categories are now too broad to be meaningful as an indicator that the people who post in them are occupying similar worlds. Requiring some official permission to post in a category would be even more counter productive than all the recent changes that have been so angrily discussed.

Sometimes the best questions are asked by people who know very little about a topic.

If there were a way to prevent anyone from ever posting on SW it would be to ask us to actually know things 😅

The site would die if that happened.

{@markpaul] well it sort of already happens in a sort of cack handed way . most of those in the trump elite core obedience base never really post outside the there ill informed political group . to be fair i have seen a couple of the trumpies post comments outside that one particular group

No.

You would be screwed.