Every user that had loaded any page of your site is your user

I found that I am annoyed with the way wordpress classifies users, there are administrators, editors,authors, contributors and subscribers. This classification is based entirely on what can the user access on the wordpress admin, but most people that use you site don’t have an account and therefor they are not classified at all, which is a big mental mistake.

Users without an account can be

• casual readers – access your site at random intervals
• follower – reads every new post or checks you site every week
• commenter – leaves a comment
• rss subscriber – follows update in rss
• email notification subscriber
• news letter subscriber
• discussion follower – following comment updates via RSS or email.

And maybe there are more types. This kind of profiling your users should help you in monetizing your site while keeping all your users as happy as ossible.

For example, some sites don’t show ads to logged in users, treating them more as partners then source of income, but maybe it will be wise to treat commenter the same way?