As someone who spent on average 8 hours a day watching the chats in FH back in the day when General chat was a thing, I can safely inform everyone here that a lot more bad situations were discussed and rubbed in peoples faces openly, I can also inform that the community didn't behave any better. General was a ticking time bomb all the time. Even less fun when you'd get a hard time from players because of the things that went down inside of it, when you tried your hardest for it not to be that terrible
General chat's design is just not there, and it should've had some sort of limit to how people could post from day one at least, such as a 5 minute cooldown so it's easier to follow and manage, and keep people from spamming worldwide messages that aren't needed for it. The most shame I feel for it was the advertising for roleplays or events and how they lost the ability to do so, but I don't really feel anything for those doing random chatter in it or spamming smiley faces, counting to 100, screaming about how their dog farted or how much they hate justin beiber, all happening several times a day.
General chat is cool sure, great tool also, has it's place in FH it does too, but not the way it worked back then.
Registration on the other hand is quite important nowadays as we do not have the same influx of users that needs to managed properly, and we do need to let the new players in on the action too. I do believe registration has started to open more frequently, but if that's enough I'm not sure of.