Redmine

Many users of Redmine allow access to at least part of their Redmine installation to anonymous users. For example open source projects allow access to their public issue tracker or organizations might allow anonymous access to their internal knowledge base and help desk.

Most of the time, these organizations would like to encourage new users to join the community to take a more active role, so it may make sense to think about conversion optimization of Redmine for them. A "conversion" in this case would not be seen in a commercial sense, but in a participatory one: a previously anonymous user which hasn't taken an active role in the community has now registered and is able to be more active.

For this purpose, we at Planio have developed a small series of patches which I'd like to propose for inclusion into Redmine.

• Patch 0001 will introduce a new setting in Administration -> Settings -> Authentication that allows admins to hide non-mandatory user custom fields on the registration form. In conversion optimization theory, users are more likely to sign up for something if the sign up form is reasonably small and not overloaded with questions s/he might not want to answer at this time.
• Patch 0002 For news articles and forum messages, display the "Add a commment/message" links above the comments/messages if there are more than 3 of them. This is in preparation for the next patch...
• Patch 0003 shows a small link asking anonymous users to register on: the issue list, individual issues, news articles, forum topics, as well as on the login form. The link will only be shown if the user would be able to perform the current action after registration (i.e. as a non-member) and only if the admin had previously activated this feature via Administration -> Settings -> Authentication.

I am attaching a few screenshots to illustrate this set of features.