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New members should get a question, based on whatever their game is. (I.e; if they play 40k somthing like how far can the average infantry move.)

After the recent "spammage"

I think it's necessary.

my opinion.

You must take the Dakka Entrance Exam of Doom!!!

I think its a good idea, I logged on and wondered what was going on. If youre allowed put this thread (or a link to it) somewhere else, since it wont get much attention down here.

What about the people who come here that are not quite participating in any particular hobby?

Not that it would matter for me because I could pass a 40k exam, but I know that I do not know anything practical about Warmachine or the Rogue Trader RPG. I have occasionally slipped into those threads because I have a slight curiosity and developing interest in maybe starting to play those games.

I know for sure that I have seen new members on here who are making general inquiries because they just began the hobby or are seriously considering it. I guess it really should be coming down to what type of community this was intended to be, and how open to novices it was supposed to be.

Majesticgoat wrote:What about the people who come here that are not quite participating in any particular hobby?

Not that it would matter for me because I could pass a 40k exam, but I know that I do not know anything practical about Warmachine or the Rogue Trader RPG. I have occasionally slipped into those threads because I have a slight curiosity and developing interest in maybe starting to play those games.

I know for sure that I have seen new members on here who are making general inquiries because they just began the hobby or are seriously considering it. I guess it really should be coming down to what type of community this was intended to be, and how open to novices it was supposed to be.

Fair enough, then they should have a couple days worth of probie time (3 days?)

From last month

Ninja'ed, beat me to it Jin

I really don't see any problems on this board at the moment that warrant screwing over new members.

The Dreadnote wrote:I really don't see any problems on this board at the moment that warrant screwing over new members.

I believe that its referring to a discussion already in progress regarding stopping spammers from being able to easily to spam dakka threads. The above was one of those idea's on a possible way and the pro's and con's have already been highlighted. So a second discussion on it isn't ideal

What type of question?

Frazzled wrote:What type of question?

For reasons unknown, I am reminded of a website called planetarion, a online game that you had to log into in order to make changes to your planet yada yada yada. My point was that the questions posed there on each login attempt were only math questions. A picture appears of a maths question and you simply put in the answer. Basically was to stop users from user spam bots to create multiple accounts and thus have access to tons of planets (each account is given a planet in the universe kind of thing)

I'll forward to Lego. A simple type might not be bad.

Wasn't the counter-argument to that that a lot of spammers are actual people?

The best way to do this would be banning IP's but the Con is that it's a sys admin, ideally they would be on the look out for griefing, and a reactionary solution instead of a proactive measure. The Pro's being that you don't annoy the heck out of your current users.

You could run a text scanner for certain patterns in the ads that the spammers are posting. This isn't unlike an E mail spam filter, but it would cause overhead on the server.

I would like to say that as a casual user I have not yet seen this epidemic, so is it a real issue?

This coming from the OP is pretty hilarious.

G

Captain Solon wrote: they should have a couple days worth of probe time

That would certainly ensure a committed membership base.

What if they were restricted and could only post in the Introduction board until they made an Introduction thread and were approved by a Moderator? If it's possible for the DCMs and Moderators to get their own boards, wouldn't it be possible to do kind of the same thing for the new users before they become full users?

It would get around the problem of the question part, which is if they have no experience with the subject of the question. Because if the question wasn't specific enough then it would almost be common knowledege and I'm sure that a quick search of Google would answer any of the questions anyway.

Boy what a bad rep Dakka would get... I can't think of any other major online 40k forums that has instituted such a draconian measure.

G

Probably easiest just to leave it as it is and deal with them as they show up. The way I see it is that no matter what is done to solve the problem of the adbots, they'll just keep finding new ways around it.

What if someone just comes in for painting?

Exactly. They would be effectively screwed. Basically it's not really screwed so there is no reason to fix it.

G