Registration shenanigans

[Juan]

An introduction is prolly due so:

Hey, my name is Juan, I'm a new PS2 user interested in homebrew and taking baby steps in general devving.

Now, to the point of this thread. While trying to register at the forums I was unable to provide any of my email accounts (gmail, hotmail) giving me an error about "banned email address" or something of the sort, but I ended up bypassing it by providing some obscure account.

Since I don't know if the admins deliverately banned popular mail providers or if it might be an error, I'm letting you know about my experience.

Greets.

[Wally]

An introduction is prolly due so:

Hey, my name is Juan, I'm a new PS2 user interested in homebrew and taking baby steps in general devving.

Now, to the point of this thread. While trying to register at the forums I was unable to provide any of my email accounts (gmail, hotmail) giving me an error about "banned email address" or something of the sort, but I ended up bypassing it by providing some obscure account.

Since I don't know if the admins deliverately banned popular mail providers or if it might be an error, I'm letting you know about my experience.

Greets.

Hi its to stop spammers registering apparently.

[Oobles]

That's correct. It is to stop spammers registering and believe me it does work. The amount of spam we get is significantly lower when these measures are in place. Sorry for the inconvenience, however, it does save a lot of wasted time on removing spam.

Regards,
David.

[J.F.]

You still need some way to provide people who HAVE to use those email services with a way to register... maybe an email address posted in a thread like this telling them where to make a personal appeal.

Let's face it - with the registration method used now, I couldn't register here.

[gtmtnbiker]

Ditto on the above comments. I personally use gmail for my emails and was frustrated trying to register. Putting something that you cannot use free email providers to register would help.

So once I'm registered, why can I not change my profile to use my gmail address? I really don't want these forum emails to go to my work email address.

[J.F.]

It's also not stopping spammers - hell, there's spam right under this thread today!

[gtmtnbiker]

Wow, indeed there is spam. I inadvertently replied to one nooby post about MSDOS and CDROM and realized that it was spam.

[jbit]

Since the domain blocks for gmail, yahoo, etc were added before we had a registration captcha it might be worth while tyring to remove them and seeing how much more spam we get....
I also think at some point we should do an account clear out, since most of the accounts created for spam are still existing, just banned... it shouldn't be hard to just say "any account that hasn't been active for more than twelve months and has no posts attached should get deleted"

[ooPo]

It's also not stopping spammers - hell, there's spam right under this thread today!

It is stopping most spammers. There would be a lot more if those domains weren't blocked.

I also think at some point we should do an account clear out, since most of the accounts created for spam are still existing, just banned...

Leaving the account banned means they can't re-register with that email address.

I can remove the gmail and hotmail blocks for a bit so you can see what happens. :) Who knows, maybe it has settled down over the years...

Otherwise, if someone wants to volunteer to be the personal appeal person we can set that up as well.

[gtmtnbiker]

How do you contact the site administrators?

There's a user by the name of mickyching who is a spammer.

[J.F.]

I'd probably try something like this: setup a gmail account for appeals from people with blocked email sites; set the sign-up page so that when it tells them the email site is blocked, it uses Captcha to direct them to a page that tells them the appeal account url. Then PM old-time members (like moi) the account name and password. The old-timers can check it periodically and report to whoever is in charge of membership here.

[jgrimm]

yea my gmail didnt work either, i had to use yahoo.com to make it work