Registered Bots

[jargon]

How do we know bots aren’t registering Joe?

[Capnrip]

There's a process.

[jargon]

Have you zipped any of them yet

[Capnrip]

We've deleted a lot of folks and Joe added a step to the registration process.

[justjoe]

Ah! Good question and as Wes said, there is a process.

Bots per se are not the problem and we do get a fair share of bots (also called crawlers), mostly from search engines and they appear as guests (and there are actual guests as well). This is a good thing, needed for content to be available for someone doing a search. Spammers on the other hand actually try to register and that is where we have enacted some countermeasures. Some may find the measures intrusive, but they are designed to allow good registrants and weed out the crap.

First, anyone can register if they have a unique email address. This isn't hard to get. Once they register, the site sends an email for confirmation and to ensure that there is someone alive on the other end. The registrants status goes to "User awaiting email confirmation". When the registrant replies to the email their status is changed to "User awaiting moderation" where a moderator (in our case an Admin) reviews the registration and either approves or deletes the registration. This process is easy but somewhat time-consuming because there are a few steps the moderator takes to ensure the registrant is actually a real person and is interested in what we do.

The registrant cannot do much beyond what a guest can do at this point, basically read the site and send a PM to the Admins. They cannot post, cannot send PM's to other users, cannot see the shoutbox, or other hidden areas. If you'd like to see the differences, browse the site as a guest.

Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks but the results are what we are interested in obtaining. The drawbacks are the registrants need to jump through a few hoops and they do not get instant access. They must answer some basic questions (and if you are an early registrant and want to change your profile, you will be required to answer those questions now). It's simple stuff and is hidden from other users. But, this does eliminate one of my pet peeves and that is bogus user accounts. I do not care to have thousands of user accounts if they are not active. Who cares if there are 10's of thousands of users if only 150 members post? Not me. And if you look at our users today, we have 117 and 100 of them are active (meaning they have signed in recently). This is a goal that we want to maintain.

I hope that answers the question. If not, I'd be more than happy to keep going! LOL!!!

[jargon]

I think 802Mike is a registered bot.