About Recruiting New Members

So, the next step of the plan is sig banners, cards, posters, what have you, and I was wondering, how is the registration process being handled?

I know we get tons of spammers signing up daily, so how are we differentiating between spambots and legit users?

I am worried that we'll do these promotions, people will join, and get caught up in the registration process that they'll not even bother if it takes too long from registration to their first post.


A few suggestions:

- We can utilize the Introduce Yourself forum as a waiting area to prove they are actual human beings. Put new registrants into a usergroup and then bump them to regular users when we know they are real.

- hire more mods to deal with the spammers during this recruitment drive. They would have power to delete threads or move them to a different area.
I nominate Aurora, Ramen, Muad, Alphaman, and garamet.

- update the welcome message that says the introduce yourself forum is available to them and please post in it to tell us you are real.

- have one of those word tests a lot of sites use to weed out spambots.

- Have simple questionnaires to prove there is an actual human behind the registration. Example "What city is the statue of liberty located?" or "what is 100+100?"

Fine, fine, I'll get the anti-spammer hack installed...

Done. Clear the queue, then wait and see if we can turn off user moderation.

And by done I mean the following: users will need to spend 23 seconds registering. I've turned off reCAPTCHA so that bots will be too fast. Direct submission (ie, not going through the submit button which is now disabled for 23 seconds) is right out.

Seems to be working. Down to one new spammer registered in the last 4 hours. I don't think we can turn off moderation, but it least the queue should be a lot easier to filter.

Thank you.

Thank you so much!

Checking properly should be so much easier now and hopefully the majority will be real folks joining to participate and not just real people who manually advertise.