New Members

[rockyracoon]

Ed is there no way of blocking the IP address of the halfwits that come on here with disgusting user names.

[craft1948]

I think Dotty has a new fella.................

[ludwig]

whats the idea with the dots jno?

[ummmm]

You'd need a trial period first....

If they imposed a no posting for 24 hours rule people would find another site to get their question answered.

[jno]

just to shift offensive usernames off the Latest Posts panel, ludwig.

[sunny-dave]

@chuck - there is smut (which is a good olde english tradition) and there is gratuitous filth (which is an unpleasant side-effect of the anonymity of the interweb)...

dave xx
(not aka fubbychucker ;))

[ludwig]

Ok, gotcha.

[boxtops]

surely the dots keep 'em there, jno, if we don't respond at all they will soon fall off.

[jno]

yeah, but they just offend my eyes, boxy. I'm the sensitive type.

[WyeDyed]

On another forum which I use, the first 5 posts from a new user go to a moderator queue for approval before being posted on the forum.

[EvianBaby]

I think a membership fee would put genuine new people from joining up. This is of course not the only Q&A site so why pay for something when you can get it free somewhere else.

The pre-approval could be a good idea though.

[ludwig]

Maybe they should feed new user names through the profanity tester and reject them accordingly.

[jno]

trolls have tried that - posted a few innocuous comments for 10 minutes before going over to the dark side. I think the system in place now is working pretty well.

[jno]

yes to ludwig's suggestion, though; user names seem to bypass the swear filters.

[ummmm]

It works well as it is. Things like this just happen now and then....we're (mainly) all adults, we've seen and heard worse...

[EvianBaby]

It would at least stop people being able to register with those names though.

[WyeDyed]

You are very quick off the mark, I'm impressed.

[bibblebub]

How about a new user being allocated a temporary username(*), and that is replaced by their requested username once it has been ok'd. An email would confirm the change.

(*) the temporary username could be a randomly generated combination of common words/syllables so that it looks a bit like a real word and not just a random sequence of letters and numbers. I think AOL used to use this method for generating mailbox names when their '1 month free trial' discs were ubiquitous several years ago.

[cazzz1975]

threads about the halfwits only serve to give them a platform for more high jinks, if everyone ignored them it would be a lot easier, the mods seem to have things ticking over okay.

[cazzz1975]

.