Registered user

A registered user is one who uses a program or a website and provides his credentials, effectively proving his identity.

Technical differences

Generally speaking, any person can become a registered user by providing some credentials, usually in the form of a username (or email) and password.After that, one can access information and privileges unavailable to non-registered users, usually referred to simply as guests. The action of providing the proper credentials for a website is called logging in, or signing in.

Advantages of using user registration

Since the site knows about the identity of persona using the page, it can:
* Display personalized data (the simplest way is saying "Hello, John!")
* Switch to personalized settings (e.g., "Disable pictures" or change site language)
* Let the user perform actions from his identity (like post in a forum using his nickname)
* Access private data (like email or pm)
* Control automated edits, also known as spamming

Criticism

With the introduction of Web 2.0, the popularity of using user registration systems on sites raised significantly. Nowadays it bothers many people who use many sites and thus need to create accounts everywhere. This is not always convenient, because of
* The need to fill often quite lengthy forms
* The need to remember many different usernames and passwords
* Privacy Concerns