New User Registration

[bbagnall]

In order to combat the spam that's been plaguing these forums we've added Textual Confirmation for new registrations. It asks a simple question to make sure you are human, and as an added bonus it generates the error "Could not connect to smtp host: 111: Connection refused."

Don't worry about this error and you will be able to login immediately.

We're still trying to figure out how to get email working with Sourceforge and phpBB. If anyone knows about how to solve this issue, let us know.

[bbagnall]

Our sincere apologies for the recent spam that showed up in the forums. I'm researching why Textual Confirmation didn't prevent this.

[imaqine]

Have you deleted the users that have been created to be used for spam? You probably have already seen this link but this might be helpful, http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=427852.

The link above has a bunch of useful mods that you can install for spam.

[bbagnall]

I changed the questions in Textual Confirmation and it seems to have things in control again. The old questions asked for color, so perhaps the spambot broke through by replying with different colors.

The big problem is we haven't been able to use mail sending with Sourceforge. Neither the mail script nor our best guess at their mail server seems to work. If you see a Sourceforge hosted phpBB working with mail, let me know and I'll ask their admin what they did.

[newUser]

Appreciate you're trying to avoid spamming, but your Textual Confirmation also tends to keep those of us who do not have the NXT kit (i.e. have NXT 2.0 and/or Educational kits) out! Hasty research required on Google to try and figure out the answers!!!

[Rockmaninoff]

Agreed, I had to search to find the old model number for the kit. The newer model number, 8547, wasn't recognized. I imagine the educational kit would also not be (9797). As a college student and having tutored kids using the educational kit, that's a pretty large user base that would have difficult accessing the site. I'm sure there's a good amount of people that would get frustrated with registration and decide not to contribute.

Any way to maybe add those two numbers to the acceptable answers for that question?

[skoehler]

I added the answers for the education kit to the textual confirmation. Also, mailing is working again and registration requires a valid email address.