Unregistered guests?

[the gadfly]

It's been a long time since I've seen a post from an unregistered guest. I assume you, whoever you are, disabled that feature. Is that wise?

The only reason I became a member was because I could put my toe in the water, so to speak, and give posting here a test run.

Yeah, yeah. Now that I'm here, I know you probably wish you never had that option turned on.

Still, there could be another gadfly out there, somewhere.

 

[Archaic]

Hmmm....that's odd. I know we disabled it at some point due to either a spammer or fear of the D/P rush, but I thought we'd re-enabled it by now. *Does so*

 

[Nick]

While you are one of the mature posters on this board; as I understand it, Unregistered Posting was turned off because spammers were taking advantage of it to advertise their products and make generally stupid posts. It is probably for the best that it should stay off permanently as it has been for the past several months.

Edit because of Archaic's post: Uh oh...

 

[Archaic]

Ah yes, now I remember why it was disabled.

Well, we'll give it a short trial run again, see how it works out. If I can find an image verification plugin that unregistered users can use to post, we'll make it a permanent addition, but otherwise, it'll get turned off at the first real sign of trouble.

 

[the gadfly]

Unregistered Posting was turned off because spammers were taking advantage of it to advertise their products and make generally stupid posts.

If it becomes a serious problem, I will support disabling unregistered posting.

Has it been a problem in the past? I haven't seen it since I began posting at the end of last year as Unregistered. We've had far more problems from registered members.

Just look at the Hall of Shame. There isn't a single post there from Unregistered. Lots of spam from registered members, but none from unregistered guests.

As for unregistered guests making stupid posts, we should be harder on them than registered members?

If we do get some crap, isn't that fodder for the Hall of Shame? Is there nothing else we love to do more than mock?

 

[Archaic]

It was a problem for a while, with unregistered's posting advertisments for various products ("Generic Viagra", etc). Since we turned off unregistered posting, it seems they've just started registering accounts to do that crap.

 

[the gadfly]

Well then, I suppose an image verification plugin would be a good idea. Both during registration of new members and for unregistered guests making posts.

I don't think it would be too hard to find one.

 

[Zhen Lin]

It already is there. These are humans posting spam.

 

[the gadfly]

Ok, maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I'm missing something.

If the problems BMGf has supposedly been having with spam are due to actual human registered members, why is that an argument against unregistered posters?

Is there any evidence of spam from unregistered guests? The only way an unregistered guest could make a post--at least when I was unregistered--was to click on the "post reply" button. An unregistered guest couldn't start a new thread let alone edit or delete his/her post.

How much spam have you gotten that way?