08-01-2021, 12:49 PM
So I’d appreciate thoughts about how to improve the registration process. For starters, a little background:
I’d guesstimate that we get 25 to 35 fake/spam/no interest in DG whatsoever registrations for every one “real” account. Early on in the site’s history, that resulted in a TON of spam posts and threads – from limo services in NYC to travel agencies in Australia and everything in between. There are some tools to take that stuff down with relative ease, but it was still pretty annoying and time consuming.
I added the captcha and security question to the registration process at some point. It helped a little, but not much. What I tried next, for a long while, was to email every new registration, asking them to tell me a bit about their interest in DG investing. I was just looking for a few words of reassurance that they were real people with an interest in the site. That worked pretty well to weed out the spammers, but it was really time-intensive for me, and slow and cumbersome for actually interested people.
Eventually, with the ratio of spam account to real ones still very high, I switched to the current mechanism (which you can see described if you log out of the site and then hit the “register” button). Basically, I asked that after registering through the site, they also send me a separate email, to one of my personal email accounts, expressing their interest. (Again, there were no magic words I needed to see – if they were willing to take the step at all, I took it as a good sign they were real potential users.) This took the pressure off of me, time-wise, and it worked well in a few cases. But I got very few of those emails, even during the period that I was AWOL and you all were trying to get new people registered. I wonder if most people just skip the registration screen with those instructions, or if there is some other infirmity with that approach.
So that’s where it stood before making Divmenow an Admin a few days ago. He mentioned tracking IP addresses to try to get at real versus spam users. I’d like to hear more about how that works.
I’m open to anything that makes the process quicker and easier. Maybe it doesn’t need to be locked down so hard (that is, registration could be automatic) if we have a number of Mods willing to police and eradicate spam. I tend to think it is still a wiser approach to pre-screen somehow before allowing folks to post, but I am happy to defer if folks disagree with that. And whatever we try can always be undone.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the forum software itself. I chose “MyBB” based on some research I did when starting the site. I think it was well-reviewed, and open source, and seemed to have a fair amount of support, etc. But that was back in 2012 or 2013 (I think!). There may be other forum software available with better functionality, speed, and spam management tools. I wouldn’t be interested in starting all over, but it may be possible to port all of the old / existing posts and threads to new software. I think this would be a longer-term project, and that we should do what we can on the existing platform for now. But just to put everything on the table, I thought I’d mention this too. So if any of you participate in forums that have good user interface and features, please let me know.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Thanks!
I’d guesstimate that we get 25 to 35 fake/spam/no interest in DG whatsoever registrations for every one “real” account. Early on in the site’s history, that resulted in a TON of spam posts and threads – from limo services in NYC to travel agencies in Australia and everything in between. There are some tools to take that stuff down with relative ease, but it was still pretty annoying and time consuming.
I added the captcha and security question to the registration process at some point. It helped a little, but not much. What I tried next, for a long while, was to email every new registration, asking them to tell me a bit about their interest in DG investing. I was just looking for a few words of reassurance that they were real people with an interest in the site. That worked pretty well to weed out the spammers, but it was really time-intensive for me, and slow and cumbersome for actually interested people.
Eventually, with the ratio of spam account to real ones still very high, I switched to the current mechanism (which you can see described if you log out of the site and then hit the “register” button). Basically, I asked that after registering through the site, they also send me a separate email, to one of my personal email accounts, expressing their interest. (Again, there were no magic words I needed to see – if they were willing to take the step at all, I took it as a good sign they were real potential users.) This took the pressure off of me, time-wise, and it worked well in a few cases. But I got very few of those emails, even during the period that I was AWOL and you all were trying to get new people registered. I wonder if most people just skip the registration screen with those instructions, or if there is some other infirmity with that approach.
So that’s where it stood before making Divmenow an Admin a few days ago. He mentioned tracking IP addresses to try to get at real versus spam users. I’d like to hear more about how that works.
I’m open to anything that makes the process quicker and easier. Maybe it doesn’t need to be locked down so hard (that is, registration could be automatic) if we have a number of Mods willing to police and eradicate spam. I tend to think it is still a wiser approach to pre-screen somehow before allowing folks to post, but I am happy to defer if folks disagree with that. And whatever we try can always be undone.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the forum software itself. I chose “MyBB” based on some research I did when starting the site. I think it was well-reviewed, and open source, and seemed to have a fair amount of support, etc. But that was back in 2012 or 2013 (I think!). There may be other forum software available with better functionality, speed, and spam management tools. I wouldn’t be interested in starting all over, but it may be possible to port all of the old / existing posts and threads to new software. I think this would be a longer-term project, and that we should do what we can on the existing platform for now. But just to put everything on the table, I thought I’d mention this too. So if any of you participate in forums that have good user interface and features, please let me know.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Thanks!