Forum new members

chris3471 said: "Anybody know why people join a forum but never post? I have had 18 new member registrations since March 4th and only 2 have posted. Is there something I don't know about registering at forums? I mean do they get a backlink or something out of this?:confused:"

Darren said: "Yes, they get a backlink by default. That's why they join. Many of them are bots."

chris3471 said: "I thought that was the case, maybe I should turn the email confirmation back on, I had turned it off temporarily hoping that if I made it easier maybe more people would join, I had planned to turn it back on after I had a small community of posters established. Bad idea I guess."

Darren said: "You have to at least make it hard for bots, or you'll end up spammed to death. Definitely require email activation."

chris3471 said: "Doing that right now."

Darksat said: "Also lurkers use it so they can see new posts since they last came."

chris3471 said: "Just got another new member that didn't post, I turned on the email confirmation. I don't use the visual confirmation because it won't work or it confuses people being that it's case sensitive not sure which but I even had a lot of trouble registering a test account when I started the forum. Maybe when I get some time I will have to take a hack at making it not case sensitive. In any case getting a lot of bots must just mean I'm moving up in the world."

Darksat said: "adding/removing or rearanging a couple of fields usually screws up bots."

chris3471 said: "So maybe I could just rename the email feild or something then."

Heather said: "How's the battle of the bots going, Chris? Fending them off with your light saber?"

chris3471 said: "I won the battle but I'm sure the war is not over just yet. I have completely stopped the bots by changing the name of the registration agreement fields, I also made it use both upper and lowercase characters. Now this will have no effect on the human bots but at least I can keep up with them, I couldn't possibly keep up with something that could make 40+ posts in a few seconds."

Heather said: "Cool beans, dude! Glad to hear you outsmarted them :)"

chris3471 said: "I just wonder how long it will work. In any case it give me some more time to figure out why the visual confirmation isn't working. I'll do that in my test forum by process of elimination, I'll simply swap files untill I get it to work and then make the changes to the real forum."