Forum registration issues

[Steve]

Just wondering how many new users you get around these parts, as I had a helluva time trying to register with the 'name on of the devs' question.

I tried a whole bunch of names from here https://enigma-dev.org/about.htm but they weren't accepted.

It was just by luck that I found someones real name scrolling at the top of the screen for GIT commits that got me through.

Have I stepped in to some secret society?

[Goombert]

Hello, and welcome! No you've not stepped into some secret society. Sorry for the confusion, but this is Josh's anti-spam technique that he's used here for some time. I can maybe bring this up to him when I next see him, perhaps we could extend it with additional names now since there have been a lot more new people.

Feel free to look around and ask questions on the help desk if you get stuck at all. We also hang out in Discord, which tends to be more active:
https://discordapp.com/invite/Kz67atZ

[Steve]

Thanks Goombert.

Was just worried you might be losing sign-ups, as it is very difficult to find the full names required for registration, given that the 'about' page only gives first names, which fails the test.

[Josh @ Dreamland]

I have updated the Wiki to display my full name, again (I am not sure who removed it). I have also updated the form to accept "Goombert" and a few other people, since Robert hid his full name.

The expected course of action is for users to hit the back button on their browser and copy one of those names. Spam farms send the entire registration questions page to human workers to attempt to break. The information can therefore not appear on that page. For new members who don't know the team, the simplest way is to hit "back" and read the list at the bottom of the page, or to do what you did.

[faissaloo]

Why exactly aren't we just using a regular old CAPTCHA?

[Darkstar2]

Welcome to the forum

Have I stepped in to some secret society?

If only you knew  No worries though, you need some extra paperwork to be promoted to Illuminati

[Josh @ Dreamland]

A regular-old CAPTCHA can be sent to a human CAPTCHA filling farm. You have to be genuinely intelligent to fill out the registration questions on this site. And I like it that way.

In the future, we may invest in OpenID/OAuth as a means of signing in. I anticipate letting people sign in with their GitHub ID without filling in any of those boxes.

In the interim, this strong anti-spam system is me doing my part to keep bots from exploiting user links to increase their own page rank.