New members: Registration issues, posting, etc.

Myrthos

Cave Canem
Administrator
Joined
August 30, 2006
Messages
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This thread is meant to provide information, especially to new members, or those who have issues in the registration process.

Registration and activation
When you register, you are sent an activation mail. This is needed to activate your account. If you do not do this you are restricted in your activities on this forum, like being unable to post.

You might not have received a mail. This has three possible reasons:
1) You entered the wrong email address. If so, just change it.
2) Your mail ended up in the spam folder. Gmail for example does that a lot,
3) RPGWatch is blocked by your provider.

The mail should be sent to you in a matter of minutes. If you have not received the mail, contact us.

After registration
Once you activated your mail, you can post, but the following restrictions are still in place:
- Your posts need to be moderated
- Your threads need to be moderated
- You cannot create polls
- You cannot edit or delete your posts
- You cannot use a signature
- You cannot upload an avatar
- You cannot edit your profile
And a few other things.

Any new member entering information or posting in a non-English language will be banned and new members will not show in the members list. All this is used to make it less interesting for spammers to register.

Once you have reached 7 approved posts (which is a manual process), we think we have seen enough of you to determine if you are a spammer or not and your posts will no longer need to be moderated. Please note that until your 7th post is approved, any additional posts you make will require approval as well (as you still do not have 7 approved posts yet). A script runs every hour, that will move anyone with 7 approved posts or more, to a user group that removes the above mentioned limitations, so even if you have 7 approved posts, it might take up to an hour after the approval of the 7th post, for the limitations to be removed.

Terms of Service
Just in case you did not pay attention to it, our The Terms of Service or TOS can be found here. Any moderation activities use this TOS as a basis, so be sure you know what it is about.
 
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Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
11,223
Many new members seem to have difficulty getting a YouTube video loaded.

Most of the time you are simply using the wrong code, you have probably put the entire link between the YouTube brackets.

You just have to use the code from the YouTube URL in your browser.

Say, for example, you would like to embed a video with the link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JFwCCL0Vh6U

Usage (but without the spaces):
[ youtube ]value[/ youtube ]

Given our example this means (but without the spaces):
[ youtube ]JFwCCL0Vh6U[ /youtube ]

So just use the number behind ‘v=‘

If the above still is not clear to you, just look at any posting of someone who has embedded a trailer or a video in their posting, and choose ‘quote’.
Then you’ll see the precise code they used.

For all of the codes you can use in your posting see the following page:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/misc.php?do=bbcode

This page is also easy to find when posting: go to the bottom left of the page when you are typing a new post/reply (so before submitting it):
BBcode is On’ => click on’BBcode’.

Hope this helps.
 
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If you see anything in a thread that you think goes against the TOS, or requires some other action of a moderator, please, do not discuss it in the thread itself, but report it. To the right of every post you see a link: ‘Report Post’.
Or you can send a PM to a moderator or administrator.

We sometimes are too busy with real life stuff to check every thread or every post. And if there is no message in our inbox that indicates immediate or special attention, we might miss it. Without a report or PM we can not guarantee that a local discussion like ‘this deserves an infraction’ will be seen in time or will be seen at all.

If you do report it - or discuss it locally - let me remind you:
RPGWatch is not obliged to motivate the reasons for moderation to anyone other than the person being moderated. The reasons for moderation will not be discussed in public and discussions about it can be ended or removed by a moderator.
If the moderated person feels the motivation for him or her being moderated is invalid, they can contact the moderator(s) and/or RPGWatch to discuss this.

Thanks.
 
Since spammers are more and more time consuming:

Until they have seven posts:
- new members won’t be able to have a signature,
- new members can’t have an avatar,
- new members can’t edit their profile,
- new members won’t be visible in the Members List, making it harder to be harvested by search engine spiders.

Profiles that are not in English will be removed and banned.

Myrthos will update the first posting including the above.
 
Sounds good to me as I see advertiser spam accounts made all the time.:nod:
 
Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Messages
36,073
Location
Spudlandia
Yes, I have noticed you have noticed. You sometimes noticed them before I did. :)

Without them being on the members list I can now ignore the newly registered (without any posts they’ll be gone automatically after 30 days).

Well, I thought so anyway last night. Now I am not sure whether spammers will be completely invisible to search engines, for there is still this “Welcome to our newest member, XYZ” on the RPGWatch forums page.

@Myrthos; should we get rid of that one too? Maybe that line might be still making it worthwhile for them? (No idea how much time search engines need to notice you.)

Anyway, just having to keep an eye on posts of new members, not on their profile anymore, saves me a lot of time.
 
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In the meantime...

I’ve learned it is not an option to disable this “Welcome to our newest member, XYZ” on the RPGWatch forums page.

It is nice and quiet after the changes, sure, new members coming in (14 in the last 12 hours to be exact), but none(!) with spam links in their profile. :) Hooray!
 
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