New Member Policy

[fos]

This topic should only be visible to registered members.

This forum only allows members that have been approved by one of the administrators.

I have been very selective. If the prospective new member has a strange email address or a web site that is inappropriate to open source software, I have been deleting them. I don't feel that this is the place for sexually explicit web sites, pharmacy sites, insurance, real estate sales, etc.....

Unfortunately, I have probably deleted a few members that are legitimate otherwise.

What does the membership think? How restrictive should membership here be?

So far, we have kept the spam to a minimum. The discussion here has been polite, informative, and entertaining at times. I would like to keep it that way.

Suggestions?

Thanks, fos....

[Lavene]

Screening people you don't know anything about is not easy. What's a strange e-mail address? getting 'sensible' e-mail addresses is not always that easy as you often have to select a username that is uniqe among maybe millions. Just try to register a hotmail or yahoo mail account with your name or nick...

I have been very selective. If the prospective new member has a strange email address or a web site that is inappropriate to open source software

I don't know if my e-mail, @bestemselv.com, is 'strange' to an english speaker, but it is my Norwegian domain name meaning "decide for your self". Also, part of my website is highly political and has nothing to do with OSS. But I like to think I'm a fairly decent forum member still...

So you are bound to reject decent people. Those decent people will peobably just shrug and move on and we'll never see them here.
I would sugest that instead of trying to weed out the bad people based on assumptions you let people inn and see what they do. If they don't behave it's easy to kick them out anyway.

The problem with being too restrictive is that the forum will 'die of starvation' fairly quickly because of a lack of new input. And I personally prefer an active forum with the occational spam posts to a dead, although spam free, forum.

But that's just me...

Tina :)

[fos]

Thanks Tina, point well taken.

fos....

[autek]

I agree with Tina, its not always a good idea to pre-judge. Just my thoughts.

Ed

[danieldk]

I think it is a good idea to try a different approach. I promised that I'd implement that, though I didn't have time to do it yet. The thing is that I think that spammers use standard scripts to do their stuff (I also maintain a PunBB forum, which has virtually no spam users). So, I think that renaming one or two POST variable names that are used for the registration may help. That may block automatic scripts, and not legitimate users.

The current approach works well against spam, but I think/guess that there are users that even won't initially wait a few hours to have their account activated. There are a lot of other forums out there, so it may be too much of a hassle for them.

So, I'd say, let's continue to apply the current policy, until I have some time for the name mangling (should be done soon), and wait and see after that change if it protects us from spammers.

[krp]

Suggestions?

My two cents is that this is your board and you can run it anyway you want.

krp

[Harold]

Screening people you don't know anything about is not easy.

Go to the top of this page and click on Memberlist. When you get there, sort by Joined Date & Descending. Now start clicking on the users' website buttons.

[fos]

I did. You should have seen it before it was cleaned up. :)

fos....

[mdevour]

I don't know the capabilities of PHPBB, but if you could put new members on moderation you'd be able to head off all the spammers except the few who are willing to invest time in creating a legitimate looking reputation. That should take care of most, don't you think?

You'll see the first few posts of every new member and make your decision based on that. I don't know that that's more of a burden than you're already under, but at least you won't have to clean up the forums if you've made a mistake.

Be well,

Mike D.

[fos]

Hi Mike,

New member moderation is a nice idea. I don't believe that is available with standard phpbb. I'll check to see if mods are available.

I have been considering changing to vbulletin or invisionboard but they both have a significant cost. It may be worth it if problems develop.

Thanks, fos....

[danieldk]

I wouldn't touch mods, they are a pain to keep up to date with new phpBB version. Might as well switch to a better forum, but unfortunately that costs $$$.

[mdevour]

I bought a copy of vBulletin for $160 (US) a few months ago.

I'm gradually climbing the learning curves I need to customize it extensively, but everything I've seen about it so far is very well done.

I'm trying to drastically simplify and de-clutter the user interface, so that my group of older or less sophisticated folks won't have to face all the full-up techno-gee-whizz you see on so many of the gamerz b0ardz. That's the only reason I don't have it in production yet. You wouldn't have nearly as much to do to get it going.

It costs $30 a year to maintain full support. All told, I don't think it's a bad price for the quality of the code and the enthusiasm of the support forums and hacker community it makes available to you.

I'd kick in $20 if you decided to take up a collection! :lol:

Be well,

Mike D.

[fos]

Hi Mike,

.....I'd kick in $20 if you decided to take up a collection!

Wow! That is a very generous offer! Let me get everything set up and make it worth a donation and I may take you up on it. :)

vBulletin is well documented. I have yet to post on their forum but have read several threads.

I'm going to try a trial transfer of this board to vb when my ISP fixes the line problem that came up this afternoon. We have had a lot of rain the last couple of days. All of a sudden we have some serious noise on the line and less than dial up speed on the DSL line. Too slow to upload the ImPex files to the server.

Thanks again,
fos...

[jpaulb]

Would it be possible to send an email to the new registrant with a password, a link to where they must type in the password within a time limit?

This way if the email address is fake the time limit would expire and access is denied.

[fos]

We have email authorization enabled along with a graphic response. Right now spam seems to be at a low level. Knock on wood!

Thanks, fos...