Maidens of the Kaleidoscope
~Bunbunmaru News~ => Letters to the Editor => Topic started by: Xuande on January 16, 2012, 05:22:18 AM
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Why does this forum have such harsh posting restrictions? I can understand wanting to keep out bots but I think this forum takes it too far. I've signed up to a lot of forums but I've never seen a forum so restrictive on new people. Not only do posts by new members have to be allowed by a moderator but individual posts themselves have a captcha that need filling out as well as a bot question. I don't want to come off as just whining but with all these restrictions this board just comes off as unfriendly and not fun to use.
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I really wish we didn't have to use those methods for the first few posts, but we were hit extremely hard with spam over the last couple months, and these methods unfortunately work to get rid of almost all of them.
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That sucks. I wouldn't think a somewhat obscure board like this would be a big target for spam.
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Although I definitely agree that it's a bit much, it can't be helped much right now. Moderator/Janitor approval kind of sucks, but I think it's a bit questionable to say 10 posts of captchas is enough to leave. I mean, you're already 4/10.
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Hey there, I'm one of the people who approve comments and topics for posting.
I realize it's a pain to have to put up with this for your first ten posts, but after those ten posts are done, you're in the clear. And you're in the clear within a spam/bot-free community. I think you'll find the people here pretty cool, and there's a board for just about every niche.
Anyway, hope you'll stick around, I think you'll like it here.
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Is this moderator/janitor approval thing new? I don't remember it happening to me when I joined a few months ago. Actually I forgot about the captcha thing as well until reading this just now.
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It's new as of a month or two ago, yeah.
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Also it seems to be only three posts that need approval. Secret secret.
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Also it seems to be only three posts that need approval. Secret secret.
You fool! Now everyone knows. I'll have to arbitrarily choose another integer between two and four.
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You fool! Now everyone knows. I'll have to arbitrarily choose another integer between two and four.
Inclusive or exclusive?
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CAPTCHAs as well as the manual approval should automatically go away at 3 posts. This was in direct response to spammers who weren't bots but just pay per post human operations, which pretty much defeats any sort of CAPTCHA (also BR????)
The other restrictions (no avatars, no PM, no access to certain forums) is more historical and has more to do with encouraging participation. All avatars are hosted serverside. So to not waste space on a bunch of one post wonders it's assumed that most likely if you make the 10 posts to earn them, you're not likely to just up and leave shortly after. Same with PMing, you can always reply to someone PMing you, but sending PMs unsolicited is blocked for privacy and spam control. Access to certain forums like the offtopic forum, Shrinemaiden Cafe, and the blog thread area LettyJournal, is to protect the privacy from people looking to just snoop without participating. Same with viewing the profile details of other members. We take user privacy rather seriously here, and postcount limits are an effective means to determine how "invested" you are in the community here.
Also, as a note, posts in this particular subforum are ALWAYS moderated for approval. This is supposed to be a forum where you can address questions to the staff, and by requiring posts to be approved, it allows you to safely ask a question of the staff privately (only staff members and janitors can see unapproved posts). If we deem it's something that is useful to publicly address, such as this thread, we can go ahead and approve it.
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I just wanted to post to say that the restrictions have apparently been relaxed, and the new ones are a lot nicer than this.
Although I loved the 'Are you a bot' question. I couldn't help typing in 'yes' once, but then it wouldn't let me post :P