About email restrictions on this forum

[glantucan]

Hi

First I want  to congratulate you for this awesome piece of software. I really like it and will use it.

But,... I really think this forum would have much more external contributions if you wouldn't forbid in the registration process the use of email adresses from hotmail, gmail, yahoo or any other free email services out there. I understand spam is a painful problem, but find really unconfortable to use another email address, and for many just impossible.

Though I'm not an expert on this field, I'm sure there are better solutions out there for spam.

Please, take this as a kind suggestion, I don't want to bother you, really

Regards
Glantucan
 

[Hans Nücke]

Thank you for your best advice; and we know that it can be painful to overcome that first hurdle.
But we really had no other choice keeping the forum clean.
We tried all kind of black and grey list technologies, and captchas of different quality.
Nothing helps, if you're not only fighting against robots, but against "real" people entering data.
We cannot afford to waste our time deleting unwanted registrations that want to abuse our forum to spread spam.

To register you only need a real email address for one successful email exchange; for the first registration.
Once successfully registered you then can log in and change the email address to whatever address you like.
It should be possible to find a friend willing to help out with one email response so you can get signed in.

If we find better ways in future, we'll implement it; and we are open for good suggestions ;-)

Thanks and regards
Hans

[Florian Nücke]

As Hans said, we (well, I) really tried what we could... plugins, captcha, custom questions and whatnot.
But the number of spam accounts was just way to huge. We're talking ~600 accounts in one month
(that was the November last year, you'll still see it in the forum stats).
And I have better things to do than check all new users / delete 20 accounts per day

I'm open for any recommendations regarding forum software with better anti-spam utilities, as long
as migrating the data is not a pain in the behind, though