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STRONG suggestion for the site

19 replies [Last post]
Wed, 02/11/2009 - 20:17
arkantos
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Joined: 02/11/2009

Find an easier way for people to join the site. Without members, you whither and disappear.

The web is crammed with options. Make it hard to join your site, and people will go elsewhere.

My experience with trying to join this site, then trying to
create a password, was insanely obnoxious. You come off like
hyper-paranoid morons. I tried to register 27 times before I typed the scrambled image correctly. IT IS TOO HARD TO JOIN YOUR SITE.

Imagine you tried to get into a bar, and the bouncer spit in your face, punched you in the stomach, then demanded you strip naked to "prove" that you are old enough to get in. That is how your site has made me feel.

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 20:38
#1
tdishman
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Joined: 08/05/2008
I feel your pain

I feel your pain, but on a side note, the spammer that they're trying to keep out only tried the captcha 26 times and then gave up.

I'm glad you decided to stick it out.

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 20:51
#2
MatthewF
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arkantos wrote:Imagine you

arkantos wrote:
Imagine you tried to get into a bar, and the bouncer spit in your face, punched you in the stomach, then demanded you strip naked to "prove" that you are old enough to get in. That is how your site has made me feel.

Wow, sorry it was so rough. We'll have to take a look at the Captcha (that image you have to type) and see what's up, maybe it's been substituted with something too hard now. About 1200 people have signed up in the last 7 months without mentioning a problem with it, but then who knows how many gave up. Glad you persevered.

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 21:00
#3
The Magician
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Joined: 12/23/2008
MatthewF wrote:arkantos

MatthewF wrote:
arkantos wrote:
Imagine you tried to get into a bar, and the bouncer spit in your face, punched you in the stomach, then demanded you strip naked to "prove" that you are old enough to get in. That is how your site has made me feel.

Wow, sorry it was so rough. We'll have to take a look at the Captcha (that image you have to type) and see what's up, maybe it's been substituted with something too hard now. About 1200 people have signed up in the last 7 months without mentioning a problem with it, but then who knows how many game up. Glad you persevered.

Actually that initually pissed me off for a time, then I got around having to type it in every time. That was something I meant to bring up and didn't get around to it.

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 22:10
#4
Brykovian
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arkantos wrote:You come off

arkantos wrote:
You come off like
hyper-paranoid morons.

That's new ... I normally come off like just a run-of-the-mill moron. ;-) I know that the real admins around here, like darkehorse, Zzzzz, MatthewF, etc., are definitely not morons nor trying to come off that way.

You are correct that having a difficult user account creation experience is pretty off-putting ... we'll take a look at what's going on there and improve things where we can. It's likely an oversight of having moved to a new site software package and not having had to register an account in that manner.

Thanks for pointing it out,
-Bryk

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 23:20
#5
Zzzzz
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Thank you for posting...

Thank you for posting... obviously I would prefer to be called other things besides 'hyper-paranoid moron' but such is the case. After multiple years of hackers and spammers I would rather protect the site and the members (that do achieve access) as compared to wasting all of my time deleting/blocking bad accounts.

With that said I have lightened the CAPTCHA protect scheme, though any signs of increased spam accounts will result in my turning into the super-hyper-paranoid moron!

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 23:41
#6
brisingre
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Joined: 01/21/2009
An Oddity

Up until this point (dunno if you changed it) there was a captcha on login if you logged in from the posting error screen when you tried to post when not logged in, but not if you logged in from the lefthand bar. I just find this strange.

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Wed, 02/11/2009 - 23:44
#7
The Magician
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Joined: 12/23/2008
Zzzzz I think you should have

Zzzzz I think you should have an insanely perinoid looking meeple for your avatar.

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Thu, 02/12/2009 - 02:30
#8
Zzzzz
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brisingre wrote:Up until this

brisingre wrote:
Up until this point (dunno if you changed it) there was a captcha on login if you logged in from the posting error screen when you tried to post when not logged in, but not if you logged in from the lefthand bar. I just find this strange.

Thanks for pointing that out! I have fixed it so that login via that path no longer requires the CAPTCHA. I must of missed it when configuring the settings, and also because I dont often attempt to read posts without being logged in! In no way to I want to annoy registered members with the CAPTCHA, the main purpose was to act as an annoyance and deterrent for spam account creation via bots etc.

Thanks again...

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Thu, 02/12/2009 - 11:18
#9
Darkehorse
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Thanks

Thanks for pointing this out. It really was news to us. Thanks to Zzzzz for fixing it as well. In the future, perhaps you could be a little bit nicer when you air your grievances. I don't think your method was appropriate at all. We work really hard to make the site a success, and honestly, we don't need, nor deserve that kind of criticism. Again, in the future, please think before you post. Obviously you had a hard time registering, and for that we apologize. But at least take a moment to consider the flip side of the equation.

-Darke

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Thu, 02/12/2009 - 15:23
#10
brisingre
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Joined: 01/21/2009
CAPTCHA on Login

It's gone now. Just thought you should know that it worked. Thanks!

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Mon, 02/16/2009 - 03:18
#11
truekid games
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Joined: 10/29/2008
i definitely agree that the

i definitely agree that the grievance was expressed a bit unreasonably. "hyper-paranoid morons" for using a web-standard like a captcha? seriously, calm down.

also, i use a thing on my forums registry that asks a simple question. it's also got the captcha, but is a virtually worthless captcha (as illustrated by the number of bots that came through), and as soon as i put in the question thingy, the bots stopped appearing ENTIRELY.

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Mon, 02/16/2009 - 18:34
#12
larienna
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Joined: 07/28/2008
Since we already being hacked

Since we already being hacked more than once, I suggest using the best security measure possible. It could happen to mistype the word but if you refresh the image, I generally get it on the 2nd try. now that the password is in firefox, I don't need to type it again.

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Tue, 11/08/2011 - 14:34
#13
Maaartin
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Joined: 05/15/2011
An idea...

I joined 25 weeks ago and really can't recall any problem (this may be a problem of my memory :D). However, instead of too hard a captcha I'd suggest to control new user's behavior. Add a spam button to their posts shown to all "good" users (a "good" user is anybody having posted e.g. at least 10 normal posts and no spam). Hide the post if marked e.g. twice. Disable any user having e.g. no normal post and e.g. at least two spams.

AFAIK, something similar gets used on stackoverflow.com and I've never seen there any spam. While the capacity of moderators is quite limited, the community can do a lot with a negligible effort.

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Tue, 11/08/2011 - 16:14
#14
sedjtroll
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Joined: 07/21/2008
Current spam protection

What I've been doing, since the rash of spammers was super annoying, is making everyone wanting to join actually send me an email, and when I receive it, I activate their account. Manually.

I KNOW there must be a better way, but even that stupid CAPTCHA was not stopping people from joining the site, sitting idle for 3 weeks, then posting 3 spam posts about purses or shoes or WoW gold and then disappearing.

Since I started personally moderating all join attempts I have not seen a single spam post. Probably 10 users a day try to join the site. Less than 10% of them are legitimate users who actually email me. I don't know if anyone has just sighed in disappointment, unwilling to send me an email, and decided not to join the site.

I would absolutely LOVE to not have to personally moderate all join requests. One of these days I'll get around to hiring a professional agency to rebuild the site from the ground up and be responsible for that part of the process (making the site easy to join while also combating spammers). In the meantime, I hope everybody is enjoying the community!

- Seth

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Tue, 11/08/2011 - 18:11
#15
budleiser
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Joined: 07/28/2011
That is an excellent post

That is an excellent post sedjtroll.

Have you heard about our new board game "Buy shoes or WoW gold from my site"? Here just click this link and be amazed! It's multiplayer is awesome just tell your friends.

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Tue, 11/08/2011 - 18:22
#16
boardgamer4life
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Joined: 11/03/2011
can't wait for the deck

can't wait for the deck building version.

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Wed, 11/09/2011 - 05:34
#17
sounde
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Joined: 02/07/2011
BARRIERS to... being here

I have related, but different suggestions re: joining/feeling welcome/getting new users up and running.

I had no problem joining (did I? it was a while ago), but I found it very difficult to "join in".
Until you know what happens where (and even then), this place looks like all business. It's a definite barrier to entry/active use.

1) Please take that "Where do the newbies say hello around here?" thread and make it an official WELCOME or INTRODUCE YOURSELF thread. Not sure how your board arch. works, but put it somewhere very visible. Link to it from the "Getting Started..." page. Somewhere in that first couple lines.

2) Rename the "social"/"general communications" forums here. Both "Off Topic" and "Misc" have very negative connotations.

"The Couch."
This is our "off topic" forum. Come in, sit down, relax and chew the fat.
"The Water Cooler"
This is our "off topic" forum. Last night's episode, atlantean politics, alien abduction... anything goes at the water cooler."
???

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Thu, 11/10/2011 - 13:45
#18
Tyberius
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Joined: 07/14/2011
emailing info to get password

The moderator noted that about 1 in 10 people to try to register do the follow-up email to activate.
I'm guessing there are at least a couple of the 10 who were put off by the email.
My first thought with the requirement was if this was a form of fishing for personal information.
So website fears spammers, and users fear fishing, We're close to developing an RPS game out of this....

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Thu, 11/10/2011 - 14:26
#19
sedjtroll
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sounde wrote:I found it very

sounde wrote:
I found it very difficult to "join in".
Until you know what happens where (and even then), this place looks like all business. It's a definite barrier to entry/active use.

This is a very valid concern, and I'm sorry to say that I have not been participating in the forums much and therefore I'm not as aware as I could be about their organization. I will look into fixing this. We have a lot of new members every week lately, and I would like them to feel welcome.

Quote:
1) Please take that "Where do the newbies say hello around here?" thread and make it an official WELCOME or INTRODUCE YOURSELF thread. Not sure how your board arch. works, but put it somewhere very visible. Link to it from the "Getting Started..." page. Somewhere in that first couple lines.

I'm looking into this right now.

Quote:
2) Rename the "social"/"general communications" forums here. Both "Off Topic" and "Misc" have very negative connotations.
Suggestion:
"The Water Cooler"
This is our "off topic" forum. Last night's episode, atlantean politics, alien abduction... anything goes at the water cooler."

Just did this!

Thanks for your input.

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