non-members on the members list

[Keith]

I just tried to look-up a fellow Hatt owner on the members list and was surprised to see all of the spam listings! What is the deal?

Keith
Lady J

[Pascal]

these are automated registrations for the most parts. The current system is not user friendly and it takes too long for moderators to delete these... i tried, you have to go thru a few pages jsut to delete one.

[Angela]

Is there some way in programming or whatever to not allow a registration if some "field" of information was not valid? For example where someone puts "internet" for the state of residency, well, we know that's spam. Can the program be tweaked to disallow registrations that don't comply with certain requirements? Maybe that's not the perfect example because a Hatt owner from Europe wouldn't have a valid state, unless there was a like "qualification" that was something unique, such as "out of country" that would still be unique and recognizable by the registering part of this software.

Does that make any sense? I've been on websites before where if I didn't enter a valid zip code (such as from a type I made), it would kick me back and tell me to try again because I didn't enter a valid zip code.

[Pascal]

actually it looks like it's been cleaned up, i don't see as many spam registration as there used to be...

[Hat43]

Is there some way in programming or whatever to not allow a registration if some "field" of information was not valid? For example where someone puts "internet" for the state of residency, well, we know that's spam. Can the program be tweaked to disallow registrations that don't comply with certain requirements? Maybe that's not the perfect example because a Hatt owner from Europe wouldn't have a valid state, unless there was a like "qualification" that was something unique, such as "out of country" that would still be unique and recognizable by the registering part of this software.

Does that make any sense? I've been on websites before where if I didn't enter a valid zip code (such as from a type I made), it would kick me back and tell me to try again because I didn't enter a valid zip code.

You can program checks into just about anything, one thing I did when I was a design architect was require a valid country code and then require information based on that country. In the case of the US it would be city, state, and zip code to assure a valid residence. These can be entered in tables that a system's administrator can update rather than hardcoded into a program.

One thing done today on a lot of sites to prevent spammers from automatically creating user-ids is requiring you to enter a code displayed on the website when you want to register. While as a user you may think this is unfair as a system's administrator you would appreciate the amount of spam it reduces. If I had a system which allowed entries like a forum I'd use that as an added feature to prevent spamming every time someone want to comment on a posting. I know a lot of you will think that is going overboard but I've seen a lot of examples of sites hack by spammers and it saves a lot of wear and tear on system's administrators.