Question Registering for this site

As Kristin has said, (it bears repeating) "We are not opening registration to everyone yet." It will be announced when that is opened so any registration request we get that isn't from a canon author will be held on to until we open it up. So put the grumbling away, You've been warned TWICE.

Not only will it get put aside for now but given my trust level after having the ocPortal setup and our Crystal Hall forums hacked a couple times; people trying to slip through registration before we announce opening are very much going to be on my security watch list for MONTHS on top of getting denied and/or deleted outright at the moment. There is a LOT of time and money involved in making this happen and my fuse is very short at this point.

14 registrations on hold because people cannot be patient and wait until we officially open the site.

14!

Looks like there's some more things that need to be repeated.

First and foremost. Look at your registration request before you hit "send." Look at it from the point-of-view of a very suspicious web site admin. Does it look okay? Anything that you wouldn't allow on a site you're running? Anything look particularly suspicious. Such as russina crylic characters in the name. Sadly many of our admins are not multi-lingual so we stick with English, with the occasional regional slang slipping in. Y'all understand me?

Next. We will get to an evaluate every person registering. It's not automated.... Well it is but not where it counts. We have the final say. And one way to get a sure "No" is to register 15 times over a few minutes.

Registering from a throw away email address. I can understand it, I don't like it. Especially since we have such new abilities with the site now. And sometimes it would be a few hours after the person had registered and I would go to check the email and it would already be gone. If you're going to go that route I advise making an email account on google or yahoo that you don't care about is one you will keep to register on sites with. Because if you forget your password, We would be sending it to the throw away and it would bounce.

Anyone who is bouncing emails from the site is going to get a PM from me once... and then they're going to find themselves blocked. When you bounce emails, its like missing a bill payment. The more bounced emails you send out and get back, the bigger the hit on your site's 'credit' rating. The Whateley Academy domain is completely new... we're able to get free mailing service because we didn't have any history against us and I was able to present our purpose and such in a way that we were approved for it. But if people are bouncing our emails, it makes us look like a dirty old mail spammer ... and could cost us our free mail service.

This is a "For your Information" If you spam fifteen registrations in two days all from the same domain and ip address. It's going to catch my attention and I'll reject them all. Even to the point of going back and finding any that got by me before hand. I personally review EVERY registration request. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at smelling the fishy registrations. We have a lot of protections in place to try and keep spam off the forum.