Site Support Thread

[Anoree]

Originally Posted by RonTheLogician

Gosh, Anoree. Your extensive labors should elicit the heartfelt thanks of EVERYONE who enjoys following Danny through this venue! Heck, maybe you should even start your OWN Amazon Wishlist?

Against the day troublemakers force excessive countermeasure work, one can consider having new members post a nominal "peace bond" ($10 should be enough) through your standard payment schemes, with all but 10% refunded (to pay for vetting labor) after say, 10 civil posts. The downside is that some welcome would-be participants might then never post.

A less effective countermeasure would be the use of a CAPTCHA hurdle for every post. Today, these are typically self-financing through the use of two puzzles, one of which generates useful work (e.g. human-assisted image recognition).

RonTheLogician

Thank you for your suggestions, Ron.

Fortunately the amount of spammers streaming in has decreased considerably. In February, we had only 737 who hit their head on our second barrier (my approval) with 24 Users being accepted. The first barrier is the confirmation of the used email address. 761 registrations stranded there. No post had to be deleted.
This is a workload that can easily be handled. I won't go specific here, but I do have my well working procedures and tools.

Requesting a fee to register would put a lot of people off. We have the Forum free for a reason. Apart from that, a registration fee would be much more work, including handling restitution claims and fraudulent payments. Not worth the effort in my eyes.

To my knowledge, ALL current CAPTCHA mechanisms are cracked or dodged by SPAM bots. There are even some poor people sitting in some cheap loan countries, getting paid to solve CAPTCHA puzzles or Question and Answer riddles. Plus, we don't want our valued real people here to go through that on every post they make.

Again, thanks for the suggestions. We really appreciate your effort to help us here.