Badmovies.org Forum

And now an brief respite from political debates and worries about zombies with a question concerning online zaniness. . .

So there's this forum that I've lurked on from time to time.  It's a movie forum not unlike this one, yet nothing like it at all.  Never joined because, well, frankly I've too many PWs to keep track of, mostly for forums I DON'T visit much any more.  But, since I was lurking, and I saw someone asking a question about a movie I could provide an answer about. .

Well dumbarse me figured what the heck I'll take the time to register.  What a clusterf#@k!

Like many here I've registered at boards that make you type in random letter codes. I've registered at boards that make you do the whole e-mail verification thing. It's all about deflecting spammers. I get it. But I think this is the first time I've been on a board that made you do BOTH and still you can't do anything because, apparently, someone has to verify your account.

Yet there was no mention of that in that nice intro message, which had NO paragraph breaks and was a darn eye sore to read. But I skimmed through it. So you'd think after all that everything would be fine, right?

Wrong.

There is NO newbie forum. So you can't post an intro to prove you aren't a spammer, if that's even why the forum has all those hoops to jump through. Worse, you can't PM anyone, not even the Admin staff!!! And, best of all, the Admin staff do NOT provide any kind of contact information so there's no way anyone can e-mail the site staff. So, basically, it's a catch-22. You can't contact anyone and no one seems interested in contacting you.

All I wanted to do was reply to one person but what I have come to find out is the board doesn’t' really seem to care what happens to new registrations. You're just left in limbo. Yet it's not a closed forum. I mean, good grief, they even have an ADULT movie discussion forum (that does get adult pics posted to threads) that anyone surfing from the net can see WITHOUT having to register. So all I have to say is. . WTF?

Setting up a probationary forum to let newbie users post to is pretty darn simple. I know because I set up The RPG Funzone (http://rpgfunzone.30.forumer.com/) and spent quite a few hours figuring out the Admin interface.  It's just a matter of creating the darned forum and adjusting it's access rights.  But I digress. .

To NOT even allow new users to PM the admin staff to at least ask how long it's going to take for someone to get around to activating an account? That's beyond paranoid. I mean, c'mon, you could just as easily set the forum up to make people send in a PM to the admin to let them know WHY they should be allowed to join. I guess what I'm saying is this all seems. . .

Well it's pretty darn close to antisocial. I mean, seriously, if you're going to put up all those hoops to jump through then leave people in limbo why not just close your forum and make it invite only? I'm confused.

Anyone else ever encounter such less than friendly strangeness when trying to register on a forum?

I've never encountered anything that bad. I was admin of a video game discussion board that had about 2000-ish members for a while, and to be honest, I don't think we ever had more than 1 or 2 spam messages a month.

I think we probably benefitted more from having a simple sign-up process and just having the admin/mods have to delete the occasional pyramid scheme post etc, than we would have done if we'd have had a sign-up process that was measured in days but no spam whatsoever.

I only spam, I mean visit, here, so no other problems. 

But post a link so I can check out the free adult content and perve my brains out experience such nice hospitality first hand...  :teddyr:


Seems like jumping through hoops isn't enough for some people...

I was once denied enrollment on a forum because I had a 'hotmail' e-mail account at the time. 
'Hotmail' apparently attacted flies or something.  :smile:

Sometimes, it is because the forum went through a spammer-heavy period and dealing with that made the admins lose their minds.  I'm pretty happy with the CAPTCHA-based system that we use.  Between it and me looking at new accounts closely, we seem to avoid most of the spam.

The worst part about it all is this:  if it were not for spammers and trolls, using Internet message boards would be 10X easier.

I Mod on another board and we do hand approvals of new members.  If the username/email looks 'okay,' we approve.  Otherwise, we check IP using an IP Locator; if not from a spam-central location, we might go ahead and approve, but often we send a "Please Confirm Your Request - Tell Us About Yourself" type of email from a gmail account set up for the purpose (all the Mods have the pw for that account).  It works well for that board, but I will say that we don't get a HUGE number of new member requests - say about 10-15 per week.  With six regularly active Mods checking 'em, the load is not too high.

Once a new member is approved, there are no additional hoops beyond the usual login.

I've exprienced this before.
The Steam forums (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/) make you do it and the Day of Defeat forums (http://www.dayofdefeat.net/forums/index.php) make you go through the same process.

Luckily, they approved me within 24 hours.