The Magic Librarities

Hi Members.
As,I will have wrote the same thing,I keep this Post from Ralph.

Due to the relentless assault of spam registrations, I have decided to enable the administration approval. Whoever wants to post in this forum from now on (mere registration is - unfortunately - always possible) must send me a personalized message why he wants to join this community. If he does not contact me within a few hours after he joined, his account will be deleted. I am sorry for this drastic measures, but I see no better solution at the moment. My hope still lies in a better spam protection of the new phpBB 3.0 which will be installed once it will have been released (current version: Beta 5).

Some other online forums have rules where new members have to respond to X number of posts before they can open their own thread. Would that work, or would spammers then just post their ads as responces to legitimate threads?

Such an option is not available for phpBB 2.x. I can not say how effective it would be.

Ralph>> I dont know if it have become a additional work load, but I have to say it seems to me to be working like a charm! :)

Yes, it keeps away the spam posts which is good. Unfortunately, it does not stop the pollution of the member database. At the moment, I presume more than 1000 member accounts are just spam. Let us hope phpBB 3.0 will offer additional protection measures.

Regarding workload, the current method does not require much to do. For every registration, I receive an email which I move to a special forum folder without reading it (the ratio of real to spam registrations is 1:100 at the moment). When somebody contacts me and asks for activation, I filter out the appropriate email and hit the activation link. The only downside I see is that due to the necessity to contact me and ask for activation, the whole forum has become a little xenophobic.

Hi Ralph,

to help you to get rid of at least one unnecessary member, please take a look at equi-nox, it could be that this one is mine too (I had some problems with the registration). If this one has also my data you can erase it.

Chris

Hi Members.
Still in activity.Meaning that the last 2 Members that registrated without contacting me,did have theirs Pseudos deleted Immediately.Once a Member have contacted me ,I add him as a Magiclibrarities Member and if he wants,I can activate the posting function.

Hi Members.
REMINDER:
If Members who want to register and participate are not contacting me by E-Mail,the pseudo will be deleted within 48 Hours.Also,Members that just want to lurk can do it as a Guest,if you intend to be an active Member thanks to contact me with your motivation.Thanks for your understanding.

This was a necessary measure at the time, but we really need to revisit this solution. The forum is going to die in the long run if we continue to make it so difficult to make an account. Every time I interact with a collector on another site who is either ready to become more serious about it or has interesting information they could share with us, they say it's just too hard to get an account here and they've given up. In particular, past and present WOTC employees who might offer insight on questions that have been unsolved for years are often only casually interested and give up easily. We need to be welcoming them.

Is it possible to do any of these things?
1. Use a CAPTCHA bot-detector instead of manual account activation. Ebay and other major commercial websites use this system exclusively and have essentially no problems with forum spamming.

2. Give several more people the ability to enable new accounts - only a couple are needed, but it should be enough to ensure that all applications are reviewed quickly. MOTL and any number of other popular forum boards have demonstrated the ability for a system with multiple moderators to not become out of control. We certainly have several people here with a long history who could be trusted with this function.

3. Make account approval automatic after a period of time, say 2 days, after which nearly all bot accounts will have given up or been shut down.

Besides wanting to attract new collectors to the discussion, I think many of us would also appreciate the randoms who register just to advertise their particular misprint.