New account admin approval

Who were the accounts awaiting approval? Is there a place where we can check user accounts awaiting approval?

I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten lax with approving new accounts. I get the e-mails asking for account approval but I mostly ignore them because by the time I see the e-mail the accounts have already been approved hours before. That’s why I find it surprising that there were accounts awaiting approval for a month, because for the longest time accounts were approved within a few hours of someone making the request.

Maybe that’s the trap; people have been so quick to approve accounts in the past that we start making assumptions that things are getting taken care of?

Now that you mention it I do remember a few user requests where the name was a random jumble of letters, the justification text was something like “I have a question” (for each one) and the email domain was “reconmail.com” which raised all kinds of “this is spam” red flags.

Just now I went to:

Administrative Control Panel

Users and Groups

Inactive users

There were a few people there that had “Newly registered account” as their Reason. I activated the following:

charlesfabbott (careful, the justification made it sound like they want to use the site for advertising)

Hatchos (EDIT: now I notice that this one is a duplicate for Hatchos17)

MacaulayDave (justification text was random typing, we can use first post approval to weed them out if necessary)

tete (justification text was strange, we can use first post approval to weed them out if necessary)

I did not activate:

sldhsknn

gsbdfja

They both appear to be spam accounts.

Like Ray said, don’t change the process we have in place. It has worked really good over the years. I guess I didn’t think about not explaining that. Here’s a run down:

1. System sends out an email to admins that a new user has registered and awaits approval.

2. When you log in, go to the Administration Control Panel (aka the “ACP”). There’s always a link at the bottom of the forums page for that. You have to re-log in again with your credentials as an admin for security purposes.

3. At the bottom of the ACP home screen (the “General” tab), there will be a list of inactive users awaiting approval.

4. Check their registration “Justification Text” to see that it is coherent and they sound like a legitimate user.

This is more an art than a science, use you best judgment. Human spammers and hackers that really still try to get into a site like ours usually type some gibberish characters to get past this requirement. Automated bots used to have generic sentences that did not fit the topic of our site like “I like cars and want to talk to people.” I just flat out delete those user accounts. Then there are the mentally ill and obviously problematic people like evangelicals and anti-mormons. Those are a little more tricky to weed through.

But for me, if they could write a coherent justification, I usually just approved them. Otherwise, I deleted the account. Originally, I tried to email people and coach them or ask for clarification, but that became far to time consuming. So I just delete the accounts that don’t look right. I added a statement in the phpBB code that says we will do this in the registration process on the page when they sign up.

5. If you have any questions or concerns and want opinions of other mods/admins, hold the approval and post about it in the private coordination area.