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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