You know that the
forum rules say that everyone must register with the full and real name. This was some lesson, we learned from the PB-Forum. Its the best way to keep posters serious, and spammers outside.
Some time ago, Jose told me that
still a lot of people register with nicknames. I don't like that, because
it uses Jose's time.
My standpoint is that I prefer him to use his time to built all the COM-Support, Example-Code, Headers, Include Files etc. so much needed from the Forum community.
Thats why
I suggested to just reject any such registration. But Jose still went on to write every single person a mail "Please register with your full name".
Thats him.
Because I knew this uses his valuable time, I changed the registration form and
wrote in the biggest letters:
"
Attention! Please register with your full and real name". And also added some example, so everyone should be able to understand this.
See here:
REGISTRATION-FORM (http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?action=register)(You may have to
logout to read it).
I told Jose "Noone can ever register using a nickname from today. I used
the biggest letters. Anyone using a nickname from now must be blind or a spammer."
In fact
I was too optimistic. Still people manage
to oversee the biggest letters and register with nicknames.
Right now we have a "
Skyking"l, and yesterday we had "
gigapower" awaiting for approval.
What happen, if a user registers with a nickname?First we look at the nickname he registered with.
If its "OnlineMeds" or "BuyViagra" etc. we just reject it, because we assume that noone in here needs "men-oriented medication" (because only Real Men use PB!).
Second we verify his mailadress and IP-Adress to see if he's a spammer.
Third: If he seems to be one of those users which have overseen the forum rules, we write him a mail.
These mails could look like this, if I write them:
QuoteThank your for registering with Jose's Forum.
To have your account approved, you need to register with your complete and full name.
Nicknames like "Skyking" are not allowed.
If Jose writes them, they can be
much shorter :-).
We then most often get an answer like this (mail is just an example but from a real case):
QuoteOk my name is ******* age **,
I am learning Power Basic, nickname ner said you needed my whole name etc.
If it would have said so I would have entered it that way
Ok, then we change the account and approve the user.
But this can take time. Using nicknames, some accounts even
stay for a week or longer and wait for approval.
Therefore please register with your full and real name, then your registration is most often beeing handled within few minutes!
I agree, Theo. Legitimate posters and serious developers should be willing to use their rightful names and stand behind their words and their work. Further, the use of real names helps keep spammers off this web site because. as I've seen, when spammers try to register, they often used some derived username that would not pass for a legitimate name. It really helps if peiple start out being honest about who they are, and make no pretense of hiding behind a bogus name.
In a world of real programmers, only REAL name should be used. ;D
I also do not like people using "TU" with me, instead of "VOUS", when it is the first time they get in touch with me.
Patrice Terrier
www.zapsolution.com
Absolutely. People should use their real names.
I don't believe there is anything wrong with using nicknames or aliases. It is a strong internet tradition that is not going to go away soon.
However, I do find myself wishing that people would just use their real names instead. It just seems more personal and sincere no matter what the topic.
QuoteI don't believe there is anything wrong with using nicknames or aliases.
I also don't think there is something wrong using aliases. For example if you are a gamer and you like to play games.
or in a single chat, and you don't want you husband (or women?) get you there.
Or even in political discussions, when you're afraid to say your opinion openly.
Anyway if it comes to serious bussiness, like you get member in a club or something, you'll need to give your real name,
to show your seriosity. Thats not a counterstrike community and your name should not be "Thunderbolt" in here.
About me I can say that I use my full and real name in any case, or at least a link to my web-site,
but this will of course lead to that google can find out a lot of a person, and therefore will make you
to be able to stand to your positions. With your name and your word.
This goes "bumb" section a bit but...
I think its good manner to use real name, or something near of it, like my way E.K.Virtanen where E.K comes from first and second name.
For gamers, naturally its not so fun since game nicks would be nice to have but thats why we have signatures to use.
What is a "bump section"?
Do we need one maybe :-)?
Hi.
With *bumb* i ment that i am waking up old topic :)
E.K.Virtanen
About 99% of new registrations end being deleted. The most frequent case are users that register using nicknames or incomplete names. To these, I send an email asking for their real, full name, but very few reply. There are others that are approved, but don't activate his account. Most of these register using yahoo, hotmail or gmail addresses, and apparently don't bother to read the emails that they receive in these accounts. Finally, there are the ones that use temporary email addresses provided by sites like temporaryinbox. A couple of hours ago someone has registered using "Test" as user name and "gtrmq8dzs54bh3v@bodhi.lawlita.com" as the email address.
This is a serious forum, not a site build to collect addresses to send spam. If you don't trust us, then please don't register, but don't waste our time.
I read what a number of people say on the subject of giving out personal data, or using real or bogus email accounts. Even some of the writers in the various PC magazines encourage the idea of keeping a safe distance from the Internet by employing some deception.
Fact is, we can't really tell if a person is using his or her real name or not, as it could be any name that passes reasonable inspection. Because we do require a valid email address as part of the validation process, you can't fake that and get on, but it could be a temporary account with any number of email services. It may seem unnecessary to ask for an email address, but in fact it is a great way to eliminate a lot of spammers, especially those that are using automatic software processes to try and scam their way onto various web sites.
The idea is to make sure that you are serious about joining the forums. Anybody can just read through without posting, and for that you do not need to join, but joining is the thing you do when you want to be a member of a community, and posting is what you do when you have something to say.
I'm doing my best to protect the members of this forum from spamers. The members list isn't available to guests and you can hide your email address.
New members that are already know to me because they are also members of the PowerBASIC forum, have they account approved very quickly. For the others, I do searches in the web trying to confirm the submitted data and, even when their account is approved, they have to activate it following a link that is sent to them by email.
QuoteI also don't think there is something wrong using aliases.
I agree. There are many reasons to use a Nick. In my business, a simple Google search of my name or product name could give a competitor an unwanted insight into my years of development work. This is a very real problem in narrow market verticals.
With spam and moron mail at the level it is currently at, I think it is very reasonable for a site admin to ask for some personal information. I use several techniques to verify a persons authenticity. A credit card is of course #1, but my favorite is a phone call. With Skype, it is possible to reach out to the world. but usually just asking for a daytime phone number is enough to ward of the time wasters.
Even if you only charge one Euro, the credit card means that the person is real. It is a little work to set up a payment method, but Paypal is a very easy method and accepts payments in any currency from many instruments. In my opinion this would weed out the time wasters instantly. Who would not pay a Euro for registering at a site of this quality?
QuoteI also don't think there is something wrong using aliases.
I agree too. For me it is not a issue but there is peoples who dont want theyr real names spreaded with search engines. Thats why i think its ok if some edited nicks should be allowed.
Quote from: Mike Trader on December 30, 2007, 04:13:27 AM
Who would not pay a Euro for registering at a site of this quality?
Well, depends where you live, paypal is not so functional. Example in my country, paypal is not supported much since it is not
Verified by Visa. That means i cant use it.
Also asking peoples to use their credit cards because of forum feels bit weird. Maybe in somewhere credit card details are shared like morning news magazines but not everywhere. World is more than just your country ;)
My 2 cents.
Every one who registers, are emailed with question with what you can find out is it a bot or person. If its a person, confirm account (by admin).
When account is created, person must know that if he stays as zero poster, hes account will be removed or if he wont login for long period, hes account will be freezed (in case of long journey or something, it should not be removed atleast in few months).
Actually we enforce that people must post with their names.
And now compare the quality posts in this forum with those posts in other forums.
We have a much better atmosphere between people in here.
While everybody knows that we would not accept it otherwise.
I personally agree with people registering with their real name but there is another way around the automated spammer joins, one of our members from the UK did some custom php for the masm forum that has a multiple choice question page that changes every time it loads with no default choice and it takes a human being to get through the entry page, if they get it wrong as a script will do, they get redirected to DisneyLand or the White House, Sesame street etc ....
The second level is to require a greetings post from new membewrs so we can easily see if its a person or a script join. With about a day tolerance if a new member does not post their membership is deleted.
It stopped the massive number of scripted joins dead and all I have to do is delete out the non posting members every couple of days or so.
The captcha stops the spam bots. Also, new members are required to activate his account. If you haven't needed to do it, it's because I know you.
Lately, there has been an inordinate amount of, probably hired, Russian spammers.
There is also the problem, that you don't have, of the pirates. If you allow nicknames, there is no way of knowing if he is a licensed user using a nickname or a pirate.
I always wanted to know why a person would want to run a spambot to join a forum like this.
What can a robo-russky get out of joining this forum? I know it happens; I take your word for it. But how
can you make use of a lot of forums like this? I feel like everybody is laughing and I'm the only guy who does not get the joke. ???
Paul,
Its a form of graffiti. Some idiot thinks he has a challenge by scripting and automated join that the admin have to track and they justify it on the basis of improving security. Much the same brain as virus writers, people who believe their own fantasies so they can keep on making a nuisance of themselves.
See what is and has been happening to unmoderated Usenet forums such alt.lang.powerbasic and comp.lang.basic.powerbasic: insults, hijacked threads, slandering, revelation of personal data, posting of links to download pirated copies of PB and Firefly...
Quote from: Andrea Mariani on December 17, 2009, 02:27:42 PM
Quote from: Patrice Terrier on August 29, 2007, 10:49:21 AM
In a world of real programmers, only REAL name should be used. ;D
I also do not like people using "TU" with me, instead of "VOUS", when it is the first time they get in touch with me.
Vous avez parfaitement raison. ;D
100% Quoted.
I think we have experienced in the original PB-Forums that this is a good idea and we have also gone that way.
Now we are there and I like it.
Quote from: José Roca on December 08, 2009, 03:29:49 PM
Lately, there has been an inordinate amount of, probably hired, Russian spammers.
They're not necessarily hired. What some of the more ridiculously annoying spammers are doing is using people to solve captchas for them. They put up a "free" porn or crack site, and redirect a captcha that they want solved. So, for example, let's say they wanted to create a bunch of accounts on a forum. When someone comes to the spammer's site to download some porn or cracked software, a script connects to the forum of interest and redirects the captcha image to the person trying to download. They solve the captcha and get their file, and the spammer's script can complete the registration. The only way to completely prevent that is to have things set up where the administrator needs to verify and approve each account.
Didn't know that trick. However, the ones I was talking about are spammers whose IP can be found in the stop spam lists.
With fdorum registration "captcha" is a weak system where there are numbers of work arounds. A friend wrote the member join system for the MASM forum which is a set of variable multiple choice questions so scripts do not get through, the next line of defence is the member must post in a short time, roughly a day or they get deleted.
I used to get this jerk Alex at some variation of "lviv" in the domain name doing scripted joins which wasted a lot of time cleaning out the junk but with the new join system it stopped it stone dead.
QuoteWith fdorum registration "captcha" is a weak system where there are numbers of work arounds.
Do you have an OCR that gets around, Steven?
I'd like to see one. :-)