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New User Registration


Moderators: Jim Murray, narcosis, felixcatuk, Sammy, revrob

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Jim Murray

Thu Mar 01 2012, 03:55PM

Registered Member #1

Joined: Thu Feb 21 2008, 08:29PM
Posts: 349

I'm sure we've all seen the pile of spam that had managed to find it's way onto the site despite the best efforts of the both the Admin team and the site software.

What wasn't obvious is just how bad the problem has become - well, it wasn't obvious until I switched to manually approving all registrations. Since I did that NOT ONE valid user signup has been made, but over 500 attempts to sign up by spambots have been rejected.

Given that, I am seriously considering closing new user registrations for BadPhorm. Open user registration is not working & manually approving users in the face of that volume of bot activity isn't really a long-term solution.

So, the question for everyone is - what's the way forward.

Options I'm considering are :

No 'signup' system on the site. New users would need to manually e-mail an Admin to be added.
'Invite only' sign-up. I'm considering making the sign-up system invite only - an existing user would need to send (and thereby vouch for!) any new user an invite to join BadPhorm.

Or any other ideas anyone can come up with.
I'll let this site for a couple of weeks, if there's no consensus after that then I'm afraid I'll just need to pick one!!
Thanks,
Jim.

revrob

Fri Mar 02 2012, 10:14AM

Registered Member #372

Joined: Wed Apr 23 2008, 04:09PM
Posts: 581

I'd go for the manual email method for registration. Using a gif image of the email address without a mailto: link attached, and - for those using screen readers - a text version in "user at domain dot com" format so that screen readers can get the information too. that ought to keep your inbox empty and allow anyone who wants to join to do so. People joining a site like this are usually fairly well motivated and will be happy to do the manual registration.

madslug

Fri Mar 02 2012, 10:30AM

Registered Member #266

Joined: Tue Apr 01 2008, 01:11PM
Posts: 808

I agree with the email method (even though I have not posted here for a long time so maybe my vote should not count for so much). For years I have encoded email addresses in &# format and it is rare for a spam bot to harvest the address. This keeps the address human and screen reader accessible, and clickable. All the bots get when they try to follow is a URL beginning with & which returns a 404 error.

lardycake

Fri Mar 02 2012, 12:04PM

Registered Member #141

Joined: Sun Mar 09 2008, 06:17PM
Posts: 186

Another vote for the email method

PingusPeriratus

Fri Mar 02 2012, 01:17PM

Registered Member #657

Joined: Fri May 01 2009, 06:32PM
Posts: 814

sounds good to me.

Gordon

Fri Mar 02 2012, 02:25PM

Registered Member #287

Joined: Thu Apr 03 2008, 09:06PM
Posts: 383

I like the manual e-mail idea too - I use it myself on one site, encoded as per madslug's system, and that specific e-mail address is not used for anything else. Admittedly that site itself is fairly "hidden" nowadays anyway (Google bots etc. got told to get lost about seven years ago) but I have had less than half a dozen dud contacts on that address in nearly ten years.