What seems to me to be an obvious solution would be to have it that when you first register, you can view whatever thread you want but you're not allowed to post. In the registration form, it will mention that you will need to send a PM to Raven or one of the other mods who will give you the ability to post. This means that it will be harder for the bots to be able to post, and still allows people to lurk and not post.

And if they're dumb enough to not be able to figure out that it clearly says to send a mod a PM, then are we really losing anything?

 

I think the invitation system would work out better, really. Because every user would have x amount of invites they could use (Which could be reset each month, or after x number of posts.) and the IRC channel would have someone on the staff around. So you still have to talk to someone, but its not overly and unnecessarily complicated.


Its pretty much what you just said, only without the needless complication of letting people think theyre registering and everything is fine.

 

But then surely you have the case that it will turn people who don't plan on doing much with their account off registering. The more hassle, the less people are inclined to bother - you may argue 'what will we lose from that?' but I'd reckon a fair few regulars here never thought they'd become one, including myself.

 

Yeah, all this seems a bit complicated. Simple method that requires limited moderation: Restrict posting from Hogwarts Applicant's to 10 posts total. After that they are either accepted or rejected (or even before that when you can determine if human but the 10 post count should act as a buffer so it doesn't restrict their posting much until a mod gets to them and approves them).

 

Is there a way that you could also limit the posts in time? For example, all new applicants can only post in a topic where the previous post is in the last two weeks or so, so you can prevent necros posts.

 

I think necros are the least of our problems right now...

 

It would be a hassle. But so would a lot of the other ideas tossed here. This is the kind of thing that you can't make everyone happy with. One group is going to agree, the other thinks you're fucking retarded and how can you alienate your members with <garbage idea here>.

In the end you have to realize a sacrifice is needed. And my thing is we closed the introduction section for a reason, and to open it again just to filter out spam... Itll be fine for a while, but DLP is DLP and we'll still lose a lot of people to the ones who think we're too elitist or vicious.

In the end, I would rather go with an invite system rather than go with restricts like 'you can make X number of posts a day' or 'you can only post in this one introduction type area so we know you arent a bot.'

The reputation system of old should be a clear indicator that DLP can't not fuck shit up like that. It was setup, abused and removed, a second attempt made and more abuse.

So yeah, Id rather verify that all new accounts are human even if they dont ever intend to post and run off a small number of people that dislike it.

 

100 bots with 10 posts each is still way too much. Most bots only get off one or two posts, I have never seen one advancing past 7.

 

So that is what they were doing. I always though it had something to do with chicken

Anyways I agree with this. Spambots are annoying aren't they?

hoves up to Ponyville.

 

Speaking as a long term lurker I would still have registered with the invite system (or anything similar) after I had found that I liked DLP. Eg after I had come back to the site on several different occasions.

In the end I think the best solution is the one that is easiest for the mods and admins or whoever else is involved regardless of the hoops it makes new users jump through, as if they get fed up of running it it will all fall apart.

 

One question about invites, how will potential new people request them?

 

Idea: Run the first 50 posts by a user through Akismet's spam filter API (which is compatible with forums). If Akismet flags a post as spam, delete it automatically. If a large number of a user's posts get flagged by the filter, ban them automatically.

 

Hi everyone. I didn't post in this thread when I first registered and saw it, because no one else had replied and I wasn't sure if you were supposed to reply to an announcement like this or not.

Reading the posts about methods of weeding out spambots which don't lend themselves to numeric answers (or anything else that a generic but sophisticated bot could reasonably figure out), I was struck with an idea I thought I'd share. Given the core theme of these forums, what about making people look up (e.g.) the twelfth word in chapter six of The Sorcerer's Stone? The specifics lookups could rotate through a handful of them, and the question could be phrased something like "in the first HP book" so that a bot couldn't just scrape the name of the book and look it up (assuming a generic bot would even have access to that data).

I can think of a handful of drawbacks to this approach (not least that not every prospective user will own that specific book, or own it in the English language), but it's a thought.

By the way, thanks for opening up registrations again.

 

All the book prints have different wordings and page counts.

 

Well, like I said, we could keep an IRC channel open for people wanting invites that dont already know members of the forum. Putting a a link or the server information on the registration page.

Otherwise, they'd get it from a member...

 

I like the idea of an invite-only system. Most of the would-be legitimate members of our forum will probably come here as a result of reading one our more esteemed member's stories on ff.net or patronuscharm or wherever, and so they can e-mail those authors directly, politely, and using proper, grammatically correct English. Alternatively, as in my case recently, I recommended Catsy's SAO fic, and would have very gladly extended an invite to him.

I don't think there's a need for any links to any IRC forums with any invite request codes, or whatever, unless it's demonstrable that there's some other source of the majority of new members. Maybe a poll asking our current members how they stumbled on DLP is in order (though, I'll be honest, I can't rightly remember how I came here).

 

Invites might solve the bot problem, but they create a barrier to entry which would definitely reduce the number of new members. We could do with more new members, not less. Creating extra hurdles for people to jump through before they're participating in the community has an effect on our long term health.

 

Like I said before, the easiest way to prevent bots and to still allow random people to join would be to just prevent them from being able to post until they send a mod a PM, if anything, this would be less work than what they already have to do to deal with bots.

 

Functionally, there is absolutely no difference between an invite system save for the fact that for the people who don't read the shit on a registration page will have no fucking clue whats going on. This idea is, on top of being bad, needlessly more complicated than an invite system would be.

I think, from a users point of view, talking to a staff member or what have you before registration would be the better choice. Why give someone the false impression they've registered? And it wouldnt even solve the issue.

An invite system would completely stop bots unless you have someone turning up to ask for invites for each an every one.

I'd love to be able to take this idea seriously, but you're going to have to give me an absolutely fool-proof method of blocking spam without inflicting actual users with hoops and hurdles.

Like I said before, yes. an invite system will turn away bots and users. But its impossible for us to keep quality of service for everyone without some kind of sacrifice. An invite system would be the most idea, since its a fairly simple process. Itll have the least impact on registration and users.

Limiting posts to so many a day or only in so-and-so a forum doesnt do anything to stop the problem. Bots only get one or two posts before someone finds them in most cases. Yes, putting it all in one spot would make it easier to clean, but you're resurrecting introductions again, and we all know how that will end.

So, yeah. Your opinion is your opinion, and you're free to disagree. But from where I sit, invites are the most preferable solution, lower registrations or no.