Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Temporary Restrictions on New User Signups...

Traffic to these forums continue to grow, both in activity and in total number of people actively using these forums.

This increase in popularity is bringing with it a great increase recently in trolls, spammers, shills, and anonymous thieves joining the site. Several of them created countless accounts from numerous email accounts and IP addresses for the purpose of trying to evade our rapid bans. MameTroll for example, sent out well over a hundred PM from a few dozen accounts (usually a couple per account before we banned him). Most of you escaped this as we deleted the PM (and posts) very quickly (before most of you saw any of it). It's clear thousands of spam PM (and posts) would have been sent in the last 30 days if it wasn't for the attention of the mods and admins.

We are working on a new way to help reduce that amount of people with evil intent that actually make it on the forums. We have some plans in mind, but the software changes are likely to take another month or two.

In the meantime, we've had to make some temporary changes. First, about two weeks ago we changed it so all new users ended up in a special purgatory section of the forums, where their posts would be moderated to make sure their intentions were pure. So now we seem to have a few legitimate new users wanting to post, in addition to some obvious trolls and spammers pretending to want to post legitimate things until we approve them (and then they are off to their malicious activity again).

Until we can implement some code we are writing, we will approve new members who either (1) have a recommendation from an existing user, or (2) makes a donation of $2 or more to the International Arcade Museum Library via the link on http://www.arcade-museum.com/library/, or (3) or is pretty sure to be legit as determined by a mod or admin.

Note: If a new users does the donation route, donations are tax-deductible as as the library is a 501c3 non-profit public charity.

Note: A donation does not 'buy' anything, and a user that gets approved this way can still be banned at will be mods and admins as need be.

The theory behind the donation is that it should be a little harder to create a dozen PayPal accounts than it is to create a dozen email accounts.

If you have a friend that wants to join via the recommendation method, have the friend sign-up and then the existing member should PM one of the mods or admins with the friend's username that should be upgraded to a regular user.

As mentioned above, we are working on another method to prevent duplicate accounts and other trouble from signing up, but it won't arrive until later in the Spring.
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