Changing site layout-educated guess about how it will affect

Hi,

please take a look at my site.


Its a local free classified site. As of now, I get around 30 new Registrations per day, 10-15 ads posted.

My question is Im planning to change the ad posting process (which I have explained later) and I would like know if this will have affect on nos of registrations and ads? I understand you can't tell exactly what will happen until I try it. But I want an educated guess from experienced people who have been doing this for a long time.

Current system requires users to register on my site before posting a ad. This process involves account activation too.
There is a short video showing the process of creating a account:

(please excuse the language used in the video. As my site is a local ad site, I used my language)

Im thinking about changing this a little bit. What Im going to do is I will still keep the registration system. But I will make it so users will be able to post ads WITHOUT registering. In ad posting process, at some point users have to enter their contact name, email and phone no. In this step I will add a field to enter a password. Once user submit that info, account will be created using the email and the pass user entered.
So lets say he posts another ad few days later. His email is same. But he enters a different pass this time. Once he submits this info, his previous pass will be changed to new one.

Thanks

 

Uhm... this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen - I hope you have some checks in place, because if I go to the page, enter an existing email, and get asked for a new password, and it changes without any form of verification, then you have a major security problem.

 

Ahh you are right. That didn't come to my mind.
Any ideas?

Thanks

 

Well, the basic idea is still okay, I think (although I think perhaps a classified site should try to get as much info about the participants as possible), but why not just implement a login via Facebook or something like that, besides the normal "sign up" bit? That way you make it quite easy to create an account, and you still get a bit of information about who post stuff. Personally I wouldn't recommend having anonymous posting abilities at all, but I dunno the laws where you live, so I have no idea if you can be held accountable for anything illegal posted on the site.

 

I've thought about your suggestion. I have some questions about it.
How does Facebook login works exactly? Does it create new user accounts?
I already have a subscribe button in the register page to collect email addresses. How will FB login affect this?

Back to my suggestion. What if I do it like this?
When user post ad for the first time he will enter email + name + phone number in one step and click Submit.
Then system will check if there is a account under that email and as this is his first ad, he will be asked to enter a pass.
When he post another ad, just like above he will enter his email + name + phone.
When system checks, previous registered email will be detected and he can continue posting without entering a pass.
He will receive an email about the new ad along with the info to report it if someone else tried to post a bad/ illegal ad under his account

Also I already manually approve every ad before going public.
So I think there is enough security checks in place to minimize the abuse.

I will need to check with my developers to see which one is most cost effective.

Thanks