About new members, I must agree that a long wait before being approved for posting can be nerve wracking.
On the other hand, letting anybody get in can be frustrating for other members.
Is there a way to ease in any known cougar enthusiasts, and still have a probation period for brand new unknown people, pending approval? I know I could contribute some time in some sort of candidate verification, and a valid Internet provider address, to be verified, could help.
All subject to an administrator approval, while doing some of the “legwork”.
I just deleted that post about the boyfriend and banned that user, so I am thinking along the same lines.
We already have it set up so users are designated as “new” until they post three times, but they can still post something off-topic or spam if they want. I’m thinking it might be a good idea to moderate their first few posts to make sure they’re legitimate Cougar people before we let them post unmoderated. I’ll look into the options we have and post here so we can discuss implementing something. We’ll have to come up with something that balances ease-of-use with protecting the board.
If you can “make a button” for showing the threads with unread new people tags , i’m sure a bunch of people will automatically go there to welcome, or report
The green arrow in the image below points to the Report Post button:
That’s an interesting idea. There are a number of ways we could do that. Are you thinking of having a particular place where newly registered members could post and the community would decide whether to “vote them in” or not based on what they post? They wouldn’t be able to post to any of the normal forums until being approved? It would sort of be like voting someone into a club. It might be a pretty entertaining forum, because that would be where all the spam went if we turn off the ability of all non-approved members to post in any other place. It would be a hassle for a person who has been registered for a while and lurking without posting, then suddenly needs help with a rebuild, though. I guess it would encourage new members to introduce themselves.
It looks like we have a couple of other options regarding new registers using the built-in options in the board. Here they are from least to most restrictive:
Require approval for the first x number of posts for a newly registered member. Right now, a user has to post three times before they become a fully registered member and posts don’t have to be approved. This would give us a chance to make sure a user is legitimate, or a really hard-working spammer if they could cough up three authentic-sounding posts and get us to approve them.
Require administrator approval of all new registrations. This would mean that an administrator had to review a user’s registration before they could log in to the board after registering. It’s not easy to know who is legitimate unless you have a list of members to work from. This one seems like it would be tough to make work well.
We can already “view your posts”. how about, next to that, view new member posts" the query lists the first three posts of new folks (The flagged ones), and a great way to say welcome or bye now.
There would be a lot of overlap between “view new posts” and “view new member posts” so that I’m not sure it would be worth all the hacking of core files to do it, but there may be an easier way.
I added some ranks called “new member” and “registered member” that appear below the user’s name in their post profile for each post. When you first log on to the Forum, if you click the “view new posts” you will easily be able to see who is new (under the 3 post minimum) and who has posted more than 3 times (registered). That way, the new users’ posts don’t have to be in a specific category and will still be easily distinguished. It takes advantage of existing features of the Forum and no modification of core files is necessary.
We could also have additional ranks based on the number of posts a user has made if you want. You’ve probably seen this on other boards.
