NerdLDN

[Big Mac]

Spammers are annoying, but I think you have gone too far in your anti-spam measures. We get spammers over at the D&D forum I hang out at, called The Piazza, but our members report the posts and the moderators shunt them over to a forum where Googlebot is banned (our admin even gave it a cool name that fitted in with our forum's theme).

Everyone on The Piazza seems to accept spammers as an annoyance that we have to periodically stomp on. Over here, you seem to be making it very hard for genuine people to sign up.

This place should be heaving with people. It should be a nexus that links over to all London RPG clubs (and other gaming clubs), as well as a general source of information about how to to obtain new and second-hand game related stuff. I think the "email to join" system might be discouraging some people.

Can you not put in something like CAPTCHA or a forum email confirmation system, to make it faster for people to join the forum?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

It would mean more work for the moderators, but I think that gaining new members is worth the extra work.

Other anti-spam measures you might be able to do include: banning URLs for members with less than 5-10 posts, banning signatures for members with less than 5-10 posts. If you could find forum mods that do that, then most spammers will join, get blocked from spamming and give up*. It might annoy some new posters, but if they stick around the block will soon go.

* = In my experience of spammer-bots, most seem to be programmed by people who assume they will get caught. So they join, spam and run. I don't think I've ever seen a spam account with more than 5 posts, but if that ever happened a bump to 10 posts could be done.
_________________
David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Moderator: The Piazza (Spelljammer forum)
Administrator: Spelljammer Wiki
Webmaster: Virtual Eclipse Roleplaying Club

[John Anderson]

Hi David,

The PITA-registration method was instigated when we got hot a lot by spammers. Every other post kind of thing. I must say that since moving over to the PITA method, spam attacks have dwindled to zero, which makes my life so much easier, and hopefully a little bit more pleasant for our members, who don't have to trawl through posts trying to sell them methods of enlarging their penises.

The delays in registration can be fully laid at my feet. Not checking my gmail account for a long time lead to your delays, but when it works, it works very well, with very few delays getting new members up and running.

However, in the spirit that NerdLDN works, if the group feels that the PITA method is too much of a PITA for potential members, please add your comments below and we can discuss it further.

John