There was a talk about the registration process on the wiki and the bugtracker. At the moment its not possible to register and use both systems for example after 2 minutes. Typical user when they want to make a quick edit in a wiki or report a bug are willing to spend around 5 minutes. This include registration and reporting/editing. This is the typical usecase. Because many people normaly did not edit a webpage regulary but want to make a change once, wikipedia for example have made the great solution to just have to press edit button. The change is then beeing reviewed by some wikipedia editor and confirmed. This can take on some pages also a month of time - but that does not matter that much because the information is been produced and its there.
The coreboot maintainer agreed that the recent registration process should be changed. There was a talk about to use a irc bot + webchat for that instead of the more common captcha. I think IRC would not be something that all people understand directly but ok, it would be still better then the solution we have now.
But please dont use freenode irc or any other IRC server that are blocking TOR users. There are people that run TOR exit nodes at home. Those people are providing great diversity for having a non centrialized TOR network. Freenode is a terrible example of a network that is blocking people who try to give everyone on the world free internet access. Please do not use freenode if you implement such a IRC-registration process. Please run your own IRC server for such things to not block any IP on this world. IP- or port-blocking is discrimination of usecases and it is a bad example of not following the net neutrality. Net neutrality is important. Please dont move coreboot into the situation that you cant register because of broken net neutrality.