Impossible to Register New Accounts

[nil]

When registering there is a challenge question that asks the name of this site or the name of this site backwards.

The funny thing is that regardless what you type, the answer is always incorrect.

Fix this by removing the dumb question to begin with, seriously. Didn't we have a captcha that worked or something?

[EDIT]: By the way, don't respond saying the answer is _____; the entire point is that if I have to create this thread to begin with, you know it is mis-designed and seriously needs to be removed.

[Monoman]

The other captcha still allowed spam bots.

[002]

If I incorrectly type my password a couple times, I cannot log in without refreshing the page repeatedly until I can get to "What is the name of this site?".

[nil]

These kinds of questions are probably horrible because they probably don't consider multiple answers. Eg, Mac Gaming Mods, mac gaming mods, macgamingmods, Macgamingmods, macgamingmods.com, (http://www.|http://)macgamingmods.com, mgm, MGM should all be acceptable to website name. Still, this allows for too many variations. And if you ask what is it backwards, it's even worse (some people reported to me that they've tried all combinations for this one). Or am I wrong and does it allow multiple types of answers?

There's a certain degree you'd want to avoid spam, but it's more important that you'd want humans to register..

You could ask a better question like what is the first letter of this website's name (one character, lowercase). Or something along those lines. It just may be avoiding spam and making it easy for people to register are conflicting goals, but there is clearly one that is more important.

[Smythe]

Which letter is most prominent in the website URL?

[WaeV]

How about 'Which fruit company makes computers?' That should be easy.

[Sparky]

I discovered one way to avoid bots:

Set up the forum so that users join groups in order to determine which forums they see on MGM; set forum reading privileges to these usergroups. Have a single announcement topic which explains how to register at the forum and customize the forum display settings. Thus, for all unregistered guests, all forums will be invisible and it will appear as if there are no forums or topics aside from the announcement topic which does not count towards the number of visible topics. So to bots, it will appear like the forum is completely empty, while to people they can see the number of members and read about the MGM forum and decide specifically which forums they would like to see.

No bots will register with a forum that has 0 forums and 0 topics. And if they do register, all they will see is nothing until they go in and customize their forum user groups. There would be one user group for every category: General, Halo, Minecraft, Ghost Recon, and specific groups for forums in the "Other" category, the "Clans" would work as it does now (if you're in the clan, it's visible), and Spam. The addition of user groups and forums can be mentioned in the announcement topic.

[WaeV]

It will be harder to acquire new users if google searches turn up empty results on the forum.

[Modzy]

WaeV is correct.

I believe in new forum software.

[Sparky]

phpBB, this forum's software, has users for each search engine. Monoman would simply add the search engine bot users to the groups whose forums he wants indexed.



Or more simply, change the Bots forum permissions to have standard "bot" access to whichever forums he wants indexed. Or it might turn out this way by default, anyway, so the problem you are mentioning would not even exist or is solved in a few seconds.

[WaeV]

The bigger problem is that new users will click through the Google search result and find only a locked, seemingly empty forum. We can't hide the content from unregistered users and expect to get new ones.

[Sparky]

It will remain unknown until it is tried.