We need a new means of account verification.

This is the second time this year that this has been going on, where the email verification prompts are popping up, and no actual emails are being sent. And this has been going on for even longer this time, considering the last new member that made an account in the forums.

Now, I completely understand why we have this setup, and that is protection from the spambots. And as much as it would be nice to have that whole verification process removed entirely, that'd only make dealing with them an even bigger pain. But this has been so easily been bypassed by the bots themselves, that it's going to have to be better to go for a more secure means of account verification, as well as making it not be required to be done every month on every device you log into the forums on. Personally, I wouldn't mind a Captcha system, or something more immediate like the Human Verification process being used in Romhacking.net.

Any opinions on this? Maybe there's a better alternative than the ones I've suggested or maybe something already in the works?

 

the forums are dead

 

the forums are dead

Mayhaps you can go and suggest something to have the be place alive then, since you're so concerned about its demise.

 

Perhaps using a transactional email API such as Mailgun would ensure email delivery. Sure, it's a paid service ($0.80/1000 emails/mo), but it's not that much IMO and it does provide fast SMTP delivery.

 

Perhaps using a transactional email API such as Mailgun would ensure email delivery. Sure, it's a paid service ($0.80/1000 emails/mo), but it's not that much IMO and it does provide fast SMTP delivery.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't making a paid email service mandatory reduce the amount of people willing to join here?

 

I agree with this, we do need to upgrade or use a different way to verify accounts, and while I don't actually have a problem with this (since I don't remember ever verifying my account in the first place) I agree with your suggestion with ROMhacking.net's way of human verification.

 

Mayhaps you can go and suggest something to have the be place alive then, since you're so concerned about its demise.

im not

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't making a paid email service mandatory reduce the amount of people willing to join here?

It would have to be Andwhy paying for the service, if that's what Joe really meant.

 

The forums are dead...

 

It would have to be Andwhy paying for the service, if that's what Joe really meant.

Yep. @King (2.0)

 

It would have to be Andwhy paying for the service, if that's what Joe really meant.

So the individual users don't have pay for this service, but Andywhy does? On one hand, it assuages any worries I had about reducing new member counts and potential elitism. On the other, if it costs $0.80/1000 emails for each member, and there are about 100+ members (not counting spambots/sockpuppets), then how much is that going to cost? And it probably costs money for the admins to keep this site afloat (unless it's one of those free forums sites).

 

$0.80/1000 emails for each member

dunno where you got the "for each member" part from. it's overall $0.80/1000 emails, so if 1000 people sign up in a month, andwhy would have to pay $0.80. (I'm not counting the notification emails, which I think should be disabled by default).

But again, you get more emails for the first three months (for free), so andwhy can always experiment and see how many emails are sent out per month and if it would be worth it cost-wise.

 

dunno where you got the "for each member" part from. it's overall $0.80/1000 emails, so if 1000 people sign up in a month, andwhy would have to pay $0.80. (I'm not counting the notification emails, which I think should be disabled by default).

But again, you get more emails for the first three months (for free), so andwhy can always experiment and see how many emails are sent out per month and if it would be worth it cost-wise.

Ah, I had assumed that the $0.80 was on an individual basis rather than a general one. If that amount is on a general basis, then I'm sure that for Whyis, it would probably be worth the cost in the long run.

 

Honestly... I'm starting to consider this. My entire hosting provider (digitalocean) is being blocked by the UCEPROTECTL3 blacklist, which is a blacklist that microsoft email services use. So any emails to @live.com, @hotmail.com or @outlook.com are just bouncing.

UCEPROTECT are shady as fuck. Most email blacklists block individual ip addresses, but UCEPROTECTL2 blocks entire ip ranges, and UCEPROTECTL3 blocks entire hosting providers, in full expectation that it will catch legitimate users in the crossfire, all so that they can people power hosting providers. And to be whitelisted on either you are expected to pay a monthly fee. It's the email blacklist version of the mafia.

 

Oh dear, well that's not good if legitimate users are being hindered from registering on that kind of scale. When did the UCEPROTECTL3 come into effect like this and start blacklisting digitalocean?

Do you have a planned solution in mind? Like changing the verification process, changing the hosting provider, or something else?

 

When did the UCEPROTECTL3 come into effect like this and start blacklisting digitalocean?

It's not that UCEPROTECTL3 is new, it's just that spam abusers on Digitalocean ip addresses have reached a high enough level for Digitalocean to be blocked, and Digitalocean seem to have a "do nothing" policy around spam abuse.

Do you have a planned solution in mind? Like changing the verification process, changing the hosting provider, or something else?

I'll be changing the hosting provider for the forums to Vultr. It sucks that I only just completed a migration and now have to do all over again. The good news is that I only have to move the forums, everything else can stay on Digitalocean.

 

The good news is that I only have to move the forums, everything else can stay on Digitalocean.

Does that mean it'd be possible for the forums to go down, but not the main site?