New Member Registration

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I check the members log every now & then and we still get new applicants pretty regularly. Today, I approved two new members: jimiayler & esilverm because their application info looks legit. We'll see if I was right or if they start spamming away.

I approved a couple last month too but those two users never posted, so maybe it took me too long to approve them?

I am toying with the idea of approving a few more, just to see if we can get more posters in here but I'm afraid of setting the spammers free to run wild.

[Dan Gould]

This place needs new posters.

Or else it will consist of what are you listening to now, punctuated very occasionally by actually interesting conversation.

Nobody wants spammers but why keep the door shut 99.9% of the way?  Avoid the extra work of banning someone who spams and removing their posts?

[Kevin Bresnahan]

It's tricky. The biggest problem with a lot of the applicants is that most use a gmail.com e-mail address, which makes googling it near impossible. Also, a lot of the IP addresses appear spoofed or are in the far flung reaches of the globe. I actually don't know if the e-mail verification system works at all because some of them look weird.

An to be honest, I've managed to find a few people who were clearly trying to spoof someone else, using e-mail addresses with slight variations from real e-mails.

[mjazzg]

Maybe we should just ask them if they have a copy of the Complete Bill Barron Mosaic. That should sift the wheat from the chaff.

[JSngry]

And if they yes, demand a proof of life photo.