I'm new here, and I've noticed this..

[Omnivorous]

I found an interesting thread where I wanted to reply right away! I pushed "Register" turned in information, and found out I had to wait to the next day for my account to be -manually- approved of. Sucked bigtime.

Sucks if you only think this from the forum user's perspective. I can understand that cleaning bot messages is not cool if you can avoid that by using manual registering. It's not that bad. If someone gets angry with it I believe we don't lose a great thinker from the forum.

ps. It seems that one bot got through already.

Well there must be something inbetween manual activation and letting -anything- come in..

I don't know what a "great thinker" is, or if a "great thinker" gets annoyed with manual activation, enough to not come back.. Or if it's even possible to draw a connection between intellect and patience.

All I'm saying is that I have been registered to tons of forums around on the web. Some I've been active in, some I just wanted to ask one thing..whatever, I can't remember to have seen "manual activation" on any forum before though, except for small Guild-forums that is connected to some game or something.

I have no idea what the options are though. I do however know that after I spent some time in this forum, other than reading just the thread that I first randomly stumbled upon from a google-search, I'd never consider NOT to register and participate on this great forum. I honestly remember getting baffled when it said I had to wait for a undefined amount of time for my account to get manually accepted to be able to post though, and abit annoyed, I refreshed my mailbox atleast 5-6 times that night before going to bed to see if I was registered yet.

I consider it a fact though that "Automatic registration" is -more- inviting than "Manual, wait-for-however-long-you-have-to-wait activation". Don't get me wrong. The manual activation was completed within a day, and I'm sure noone have to wait more than that. I don't know if automatic registering will dramatically increase worthy activity on here either!

[Etinarg]

Well there must be something inbetween manual activation and letting -anything- come in..

Captchas and similar verification systems are the difference. SMF (the board software that this forum uses) has several levels of increasingly difficult captchas, but currently spambots can even solve the highest captcha setting.

Somewhere else I suggested a hack that requires people to enter captchas backwards. That is usually a quite good barrier against bots since those don't read but automatically enter values.

Some other forums now offer math questions like "What is the result of 4 plus 5". At least simple bots can't parse the question and will fail there.

It requires modding the forum software though, which makes upgrading more difficult. But this board is SMF 1.1.5 1.1.9 and current is SMF 1.1.10, so it might not be that much of a problem here.

Edit: Today it says SMF 1.1.9, so either my eyes made a 5 of the 9, or there was an update. I'm sorry.

[Slash]

Yeah, I updated to 1.1.9 last weekend, and turned off manual activation, hoping the spam countermeasures would work better in the latest version, but they didnt

I have never coded PHP, but I guess it won't be too much of a hassle to hack into it... for now, manual activation seems the best way to go. I wonder if there's a plugin to integrate with stopforumspam.com

[justinhoffman]

There are about 5 spambots trying to register weekly, but they can create lots of hassle... I dont have enough Action Points left to develop an alternate captcha or modification, I will leave it open for a week and see how it works

I really like recaptcha.  It's easy, it's simple, and it's FREE.  I'm pretty bad at PHP/Javascript and I figured how to use it, so that's saying something.  There are instructions on how to add it and use it, and they are pretty idiot proof instructions.  You just have to get the key.

http://recaptcha.net/

They look professional and you can play audio too if the thing is hard to make out.

[5v3nd0ttg]

I agree with Justinhoffman, I too have recently used recaptcha on my website and a few sub-domains. I have since recently joined this forum and am impressed at the degree of information and like-minded gamers/enthusiasts. I would support any decision that would increase the amount of quality posting and/or hits this forum might receive.