Who the hell set up the registry form!?

[tantei4869]

I'm a little peeved at the fact that you can't register for a forum account using email addresses from Yahoo!, Google or MSN(hotmail). I know it says it's "to keep bots from registering and spamming the forums" but HELLO!!!??? There are much better ways of controlling bot registration than banning the use of email addresses from the 3 most popular email providers! I had to bum around for a long while to find an email provider that they would actually accept(AOL). My time is my treasure and I certainly didn't wanna waste it searching for an alternate email provider and creating an account I'll never use to register with the forum to ask 1 simple question just because the people who run this forum are morons who can't figure out another way to control bot registration! Anybody agree?

[botg]

There are much better ways of controlling bot registration

Care to give some examples?

Personally, I think the best way to prevent bot registration is to demand money for registration. Should try that some time

[leram84]

yeah, this was pretty annoying... i imagine most of the pple that would vote w u on this didn't bother to register

[leram84]

wait, so i cant change my email to gmail AFTER i register or even have an alternet email address? This is pretty rediculous... how am in gonna get notifications, im not checking AOL just for this.

[botg]

The only alternative would be a registration fee. And you don't want that.

[leram84]

Well I don't c how every other forum iv ever been to does it but whatever, I don't really care that much. What I do care about is getting email notifications to the address I actually use. (This post actually informed me to make an AOL account cause before that I went and made like 4 other accounts all of which, including AOL, I will never actually use.) But how does allowing us to change our address AFTER we register (or even just allowing a second address) create spam?

[botg]

The forum software makes no distinction between registering and later on changing the address.

[cjbarth]

There are much better ways of controlling bot registration

Care to give some examples?

Personally, I think the best way to prevent bot registration is to demand money for registration. Should try that some time

CAPTCHA or ReCAPTCHA

[boco]

Both broken. Next try.

[runeks]

What about Asirra? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... ts/asirra/

It presents several images of pets - cats and dogs - and the user has to identify every cat in the picture. I imagine this would be fairly hard to break (computationally at least), though not impossible, of course.

Alternatively, to not require every user to complete this challenge, you could just do this to users who would like to use Gmail, Yahoo! and MSN. So the test becomes optional, unless you want to use one of those emails.

I understand that you would like to prevent spam on the forums, I wouldn't want to spend any time cleaning up spam either.

[botg]

And what about the vision impaired?

[runeks]

Good point. And because of this I think this should only be implemented if the user wishes to use either Gmail, Yahoo! or MSN. After all, quite a lot of people use these as their primary e-mail provider. Consequently, nothing would change for the vision impaired. They will continue to be unable to use Gmail, Yahoo! and MSN as their registered e-mail provider, unfortunately.

On that note, it would be interesting to see if an audio-based CAPTCHA exists, and how hard this would be to break.

[botg]

What about the deaf and vision impaired?

[runeks]

What about the deaf and vision impaired?

Nothing will change for them. They will continue to be unable to use GMail, Yahoo! and MSN as their mail provider for this message board.

[botg]

Fact is, captchas don't help. For a single, worthless US dollar you can still hire an entire Chinese family to solve captchas for you nonstop for a month.