New Dawgs - hi, how we play, & account registration!

[castewarkp]

Hello All.

There have been a lot of new sign ups in the last week - a lot. Looooooots. This is due mostly to the beta announcement, which is cool, and whether people will stay or go once the submissions are over is up to them, but I need to touch on a few things.

First, please take a moment to read up on how these boards operate. In short, our availability to players is unique. It should surprise no one that to accomplish this, instead of doing The Normal Thing and letting you talk to PR people, the environment has to be unique as well. Mainly that means that this isn't the internet nor is it a company/consumer relationship - this is an extension of our office, and common sense and common courtesy have to considered. Ask around - it's not as weird as you think and for 6 years it's worked pretty well for us and our players.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=222&start=0

Second, I've noticed a lot of duplicate accounts lately - I'm assuming this is because people didn't read the message upon registering that says they'd have to wait for us to activate their account manually. This does mean an annoying delay between registering and actually getting onto the boards (rarely exceeds 24 hours*), but it's way better than the flood of spambots, trust me.

If you haven't seen your account registered after a day or so, email contact @ kerberos-productions.com and I will see what happened.

If you have set up multiple accounts, for whatever reason, you can't keep them both. And I can't chase everyone down and ask them individually to pick one. So, I'm asking everyone now - if you have two accounts, let me know which one you want to keep, and I'll delete the other one. And if you don't and I bump into them later, I'll delete them both. I have to be cruel to be kind, in the right measure, baby - the song said so.

On a related note, if you have an old account, old email you don't use, please don't set up a new one - email me;

contact at kerberos-productions.com

I can update your email and as temporary password for you. In a lot of ways, it'll be faster than setting up a new one anyhow.

So, hi everybody, make yourself at home (insomuch as this is not your home, and you're a guest - so mostly I mean, come, hang out, hang loose, don't be a jerk, and we get to say what a "jerk" is.)

Cheers.

* It used to be 12 hours, but things have been sufficiently busy enough, and the new sign-ups heavy enough, that it can some times take a bit. If you don't hear anything after a few days, contact me (see above.)

[UPDATE January 22nd, 2012] Spambots have gone on full attack using really common public freemails, like gmail and hotmail. In an attempt to turn them cold to that tactic, we've been periodically putting temporary bans on those emails. If you're a human and one of these bans is on, sign up with a fake email and contact me, and I'll activate your account - we can update your real email later. Thanks.

[DeepCut]

Hi.

I'm a moderator of another forum and the admin stops spambots by having a "please click to enter the site" front page, would that work here ?

I'm not sure that it works for all spambots but it certainly lessens the load.

Hope this helps.


Cheers,

DC.

[YRRAH2]

Hello,

Not sure if this is the best place to ask my question, but I couldn't find any other that was better.

I made my first post on this board in a SOTS1 forum and was notified that the post would be moderated before it showed up. That was last week and it hasn't appeared yet.

How long does it usually take?

Is there a delay because all the attention is on the SOTS2 forums, or perhaps I messed up my posting somehow and there's nothing to moderate.

Not being impatient: just wondering that's all.

Thanks

[Erinys]

It usually doesn't more than 24 hours to approve the first post on a new account. Every new account has to be reviewed by a human being before posts are visible on the forum; this is how we prevent robot attacks from being visible to the readers of the forum.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but it does take us a short while to sift the real humans out of the flood of spambots.

--The Management

[tekhedd]

Hey there. I highly recommend Stop Forum Spam (stopforumspam.com). I use its DNS-based lookups as a login filter and at the apache level to block POST. I also use httpBL linked in to the login page. I find that I still get a percentage of fake logins, but by the time they come back to post spam, nearly 100% are blocked. (This is on a SMF forum but I'm assuming there are phpbb plugins etc.)

Granted my site is quite small, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter to the spam bots.

Cheers!

[Raiga]

I tried to register the account Raiga and the board never sent a confirmation email. It refused to let me re-request it, with "The specified username is currently inactive. If you have problems activating your account, please contact a board administrator." I couldn't find any way to contact the mods even from the story writer who linked to her website. I emailed the main company email but got impatient. So I just went and made a second account. I didn't actually make 80 of them, I've just used this username in the past when it's impossible to register.

My other account is Raiga and I'd personally like to use that name and not this.

[Erinys]

Not sure what the problem is with your other account. When did you sign it up? Did you make any posts?

As for when your account and posts are improved--the answer is "When a real human being gets a chance to read them."

There's no way other way around it, unfortunately. This forum is attacked by a huge number of spambots a day, and some of them are trying to post really horrible and disgusting stuff. This is an all-ages forum and we absolutely cannot have that garbage showing up here, even temporarily.

Sorry about the inconvenience, but keeping the forums clean and spam-free is a priority.

The Management

[Raiga]

The email host was comcast so perhaps there was an emailing issue, but problem is it wouldn't just let me resend. Now if there's some security issue of using the resend feature to bombard someone, I once made a website where I put a 20 minute delay per email address (the website is no longer up because nobody was visiting) but I think it's a good concept.

Hmm didn't know it was spambots alone which was the problem. Those things do read CAPTCHAs better than humans. I'd personally think some kind of quiz question like if you are familiar with the game lore would be better. Then even if someone is manually reading CAPTCHAs, if they know nothing about why they're coming here. If it's two much programming work, I guess you could be all, "A morrigi fleet has fusion void carvers, a CR gravboat, 5 destroyer tankers, 5 destroyer droneships, 2 cruiser CnC, 1 repair ship, and 7 armors. What speed would it be?"

[Erinys]

We don't want to prevent humans from signing up, even if they don't know anything about SotS. We have a lot of younger readers and users here. It's really just an issue of waiting a few hours at times so that a human can review your first post or two and make sure that you're not linking to child pornography or Tarka male enhancement pharmaceuticals or whatever.

--Arinn

[Raiga]

linking to child pornography

Good God, I hope that has never happened.

[Erinys]

Unfortunately, yes. The bots come from all over. This is why we just make sure that you can't automatically post to the forums until we can see you are a human being and not posting anything horrible, especially with image linking.

--Arinn

[Raiga]

It's odd and also cool that the main game story designer is a moderator and on the forums a lot. Back in 1998-2000 around when StarCraft came out, I really liked the story and the person Chris Metzen who wrote it all was nowhere around. The moderators there were just some random people. And at the time everyone was speculating on mysterious plot elements like Samir Duran who didn't make it into the sequel at all and was forgotten.

[GildedBear]

Hmmmm, I imagine that there could be a pretty big market for male enhancement pills among the Tarka. Totally different form of enhancement of course. I wonder if they work.

[Erinys]

It's odd and also cool that the main game story designer is a moderator and on the forums a lot. Back in 1998-2000 around when StarCraft came out, I really liked the story and the person Chris Metzen who wrote it all was nowhere around. The moderators there were just some random people.

We're small. There are literally millions of people who play any given Blizzard game. There is no way Metzen could answer all of their questions, or even a tiny fraction of their questions, much less keep them from having to deal with ugg-boot bots.

It is best to keep certain things in perspective. Metzen employs more people to moderate the forums of a single game than have ever worked at Kerberos in the entire history of the company.

--Arinn

[Raiga]

Hmmmm, I imagine that there could be a pretty big market for male enhancement pills among the Tarka. Totally different form of enhancement of course. I wonder if they work.

I'm surprised Tarka women never tried getting rich selling their eggs to men who wanted to become changed males.

I personally like the Tarka reproductive system. You see in organic life, it mutates, and a small number of them are beneficial and most are harmful. A civilized society then has to deal with this humanely. They can't just inspect every baby for defects and kill them like the Spartans in the movie 300. Normally they have doctors fix them as best they can. But then people have bad mutations and of course want to have lots of kids, so they pass them on, and it just builds up worse and worse. Tarka handle this humanely by making it a contest to be able to breed, first males, then females as there aren't many changed males so people with bad mutations can live happy lives but just can't breed.

Compare to humans, I remember a news article where one guy had 20 kids with 20 different women and the guy makes minimum wage and so the kids aren't getting hardly any child support.