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Registration Process Thread
#1
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!
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#2
Two thoughts come to mind.
1. You mentioned having captcha + security question at some point. How broad can this security question be? Could it be something along the lines of "please explain a little about your passion for DGI and investing in general?" Kind of similar to what you have now but instead of people having to email you it would just come up during the registration process? Not foolproof but if potential members write a few sentences about about their DGI/investment background etc then it should be relatively easy to spot real users. Some spammers would of course make the effort to sound credible and get through.

2. From what I can see this should be doable with this forum software but I'm not sure.
-automatic approval of members. Captha etc of course.
-when joining, the new user is directly put into a group, lets call it "newbies"
-"newbies" group members have their posting permission set to "moderate", so their post won't actually show up before a mod accepts it
-after the member reaches certain milestones, say account age of 7 days AND 5 posts, then he is automatically moved away from the group "newbies"

Sounds relatively foolproof to me, I doubt many spammers will make the effort to post a few real posts and wait for a week.
Would allow for new members to register and start posting with relative ease.
Could result in a bit of work for mods. But quite frankly we don't get THAT many new members. And most of us probably read close to 100% of the messages on this board anyway.
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#3
(08-01-2021, 01:07 PM)crimsonghost747 Wrote: Two thoughts come to mind.
1. You mentioned having captcha + security question at some point. How broad can this security question be? Could it be something along the lines of "please explain a little about your passion for DGI and investing in general?" Kind of similar to what you have now but instead of people having to email you it would just come up during the registration process? Not foolproof but if potential members write a few sentences about about their DGI/investment background etc then it should be relatively easy to spot real users. Some spammers would of course make the effort to sound credible and get through.

Unfortunately, the answer to the security question has to match a pre-defined set of characters. For example, the question right now is something like "what ticker symbol would you use to buy a share of Coca-Cola?" It will accept "KO" "ko" etc. So I don't think we can ask an open-ended or subjective question.

(08-01-2021, 01:07 PM)crimsonghost747 Wrote: 2. From what I can see this should be doable with this forum software but I'm not sure.
-automatic approval of members. Captha etc of course.
-when joining, the new user is directly put into a group, lets call it "newbies"
-"newbies" group members have their posting permission set to "moderate", so their post won't actually show up before a mod accepts it
-after the member reaches certain milestones, say account age of 7 days AND 5 posts, then he is automatically moved away from the group "newbies"

Sounds relatively foolproof to me, I doubt many spammers will make the effort to post a few real posts and wait for a week.
Would allow for new members to register and start posting with relative ease.
Could result in a bit of work for mods. But quite frankly we don't get THAT many new members. And most of us probably read close to 100% of the messages on this board anyway.

That sounds like an intriguing idea, thanks. If others agree, I'll look into it. I know you can require moderation of certain posters, and I imagine there is a setting to apply it to new users.
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#4
I'd prefer it if a new member could post on day one until such time as there is an actual problem. After they pass the quiz. Odd ticker symbol like KO is perfect. You can ask a semi difficult question the Prince of Nigeria might not know lol. Who is the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway? A true noob could google that and try again later if he truly didn't know.

I've been on multiple forums where you are on probation waiting six hours for a post to be blessed. You can't engage in a conversation and I found it annoying enough to just move on even though I was motivated when I joined.

You aren't stuck with your decision in any event. You can always make it too hard to join like it was before.
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#5
(08-01-2021, 06:43 PM)fenders53 Wrote: I'd prefer it if a new member could post on day one until such time as there is an actual problem.  After they pass the quiz.  Odd ticker symbol like KO is perfect.

Well, that's how I had it set up for a long time, and there was waaaay more spam than actual posting. Maybe there is reason to think it would be different now, and could always try it for a while, but I'm skeptical.

(08-01-2021, 06:43 PM)fenders53 Wrote: I've been on multiple forums where you are on probation waiting six hours for a post to be blessed.  You can't engage in a conversation and I found it annoying enough to just move on even though I was motivated when I joined.

Yeah, that's a good point too. Tough to balance. I'll be curious where other folks land on this.

Thanks fenders!
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#6
Divmenow will probably have some insight. There has to be a way as most forums have been easy to join the past 15 years.
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