Registration Changes at the SWG Archive

[dawn_felagund]

As many of our authors know, we have been fighting an uphill battle against spammers on the archive recently. Our site mod and intrepid coder Russandol has made several modifications to our site software in an attempt to thwart these people. Unfortunately, the spammer has still found their way around these modifications, and we were hit with another wave of spam last week.

As a result, we have decided to slightly modify the account registration process. In the past, new members were able to sign up for an account and immediately begin posting stories and comments to the site. This left us open to our spammer, who registers and hits us with dozens if not hundreds of spam comments within minutes of registering. As a result, new accounts will have to be approved by a moderator before the new member can begin using their account.

If you already have an account with us, your use of the site will not be affected. New members will unfortunately be inconvenienced by having to wait a short while before they can begin posting and commenting, but we hope the lack of regular spam attacks on our authors will mitigate this inconvenience. Because we have moderators all over the world, we are generally able to approve new registrations within a few hours. In the unlikely event that new members do not hear from us within 24 hours, they should query us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.

New members can assist us in getting their accounts approved quickly by including something Tolkien-related in the bio section of the profile they fill out at registration. If a member registers without a relevant bio, we will attempt to find this person on other fandom sites. If we cannot confirm that the registration is legitimate, then we will contact the member for confirmation at the email address they used at registration. Our FAQ has more information on the procedure we will be using.

We appreciate everyone's understanding and patience as we've worked to stop these attacks on our site. As always, questions and comments are welcome on this post or at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.

Comments

[hhimring]

It seems really very reasonable. There already was a rule that the email used for sign-up has to be a valid one after all, wasn't there?
And you're offering more than one way to speed things up.

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you--I do hope it is reasonable! :) And yes, we did have that email requirement as a way to kick off spammers. It is not ideal to require approval for new registrations, but we cannot go on with our authors getting spammed every couple of months either, and this seemed the lesser of two evils, to be melodramatic about it.