I decided to include a login system for 2 reasons: (1) Over time, this site was losing a lot of bandwidth because of stray hits from search engine results & other "accidental" visitors, and (2) I was getting a lot of spam through the email links on my site. So, I decided to do the following: (1) I removed all of the special search words in my header tags, (2) remove all email links from the publicly accessible home page, and (3) install a login system that fights spammers. I could've used one of the image-generating anti-spam programs (CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, SQUIGL-PIX, ESP-PIX, etc.) OR wrote a registration / activation / autoresponder deal. I chose the latter, and I use password encryption with my PHP/MySQL config.