LiveCodeJournal.com forum registration
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Dec 7 09:37:22 EST 2012
A couple members of our community recently wrote me asking why their IP
address has been banned from the forums at LiveCodeJournal.com,
preventing them from registering.
We've resolved the issue via email, and they're now able to log in.
If you've experienced this yourself, please accept my apologies in
advance. I'll provide an explanation on this below, but if you get a
notice that either your IP address or email address prevents you from
registering at LiveCodeJournal.com just drop me a note with the affected
info (IP address or email address you're using) and I'll remove those
blocks so you can successfully register.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but over time as we remove some of the
broader blocks we had in place when we were setting up this is now
affecting relatively few users. Going forward it should affect ever
fewer as we use more refined blocking measures at the site.
NOTE: Disposable email addresses are not allowed for accounts at
LiveCodeJournal.com. This includes hotmail.com, excite.com, and even
gmail.com along with many others. This is unfortunate but necessary,
since without that restriction I wouldn't be able to stay on top of the
requests that flood my In Box from spambots. Fortunately, since
LiveCodeJournal.com's audience is largely developers, most of you have
your own domains and use those to maintain your professional
correspondences, so this is not likely an issue for most here.
Also, it's really helpful if the user name you choose for your
LiveCodeJournal.com account reflects something of your professional
online presence, including something related to your name or business.
Account names like "crackz44993", "JaneHotDate" or "freepills" may be
misunderstood as a spambot.
The forum is located here, linked to from the Features section at
LiveCodeJournal.com:
<http://livecodejournal.com/forum/>
Let me also take this opportunity to invite any of you interested in
participating in administering the site or contributing content to just
drop me an email and we'll set you up. LiveCode Journal is a community
effort, open to all LiveCode developers.
Background:
If you run a server, your log reviews have no doubt made you aware of
the constant attack on such systems. And if you manage a forum, esp.
one using any of the popular forum software like PHPBB, you've seen so
many spambot accounts that it likely impacts your productivity cleaning
them up.
That's what happened with LiveCodeJournal.com.
Every day the system notifies me of many new accounts, most of which are
obviously bots. In fact, this flood began even before we linked to it
from any public source; spambots are thorough and relentless.
This activity grew to the point that it was seriously affecting my
ability to stay on top of critical email. As a volunteer effort for the
community, the only way I could keep the forum running without
negatively impacting my business was to block whole IP ranges.
Yes, I understand that these days the original geographic distribution
of IP addresses is no longer maintained in the same way and doesn't
always means that a given user is from the region of the world you might
expect, and this will result in false positives from time to time.
Still, weighing the various tradeoffs, it was necessary to allow me to
get back to work.
In fact, IP range blocking is a fairly common practice for not just
forums but even entire domains among small software shops to prevent
expensive bandwidth abuse from crack sites in parts of the world where
law enforcement has proven themselves completely ineffectual with regard
to hacking and intellectual property violations.
Now that the forums at LiveCodeJournal.com have been made public, I've
gone through and removed most of the broader blocks I originally had in
place, and the remaining blocks are usually specific enough to minimize
the risk of false positives.
Still, we do see false positives now and then, so if you're affected
please accept my apologies in advance, and just email me your IP address
and I'll refine that block so you can register.
Thanks for your understanding on this. I look forward to seeing humans
like you in the forums. :)
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys
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