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Why do you need five posts to edit your details?


Creech
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This is the number one question with most new users. We are actively targeted by a number of spam generating companies, primarily from China and India. Those companies create new accounts and then post a lot of drivel on the forum designed to direct you to their malware-filled shopping and online television- or movie-watching sites. We are pretty good at filtering most of those out automatically, but not perfect.

 

The spammers figured out that we were auto filtering their posts, and decided to just post the links on their profiles instead. Then they would use bots to send out hundreds of millions of emails with links to their profiles. Despite all the education people have about spam and email, these spam profiles would get tens of thousands of hits each day. Clearly, there are a lot of gullible folks out there, and we were paying the bandwidth costs to support their gullibility. As such, we put a requirement that before you can edit any of your details, you have to have five posts on the site.

 

Fortunately, most spammers can't read English, so instead they spent hours clicking on the Edit Profile button over and over again waiting for it to activate. Quite amusing to watch, actually.

 

So, why don't we use Captcha or something similar? Well, actually we do! The problem is that labor is so cheap in China and India that they can pay humans to create all this spam, and humans are very good at solving Captcha-type puzzles even when they don't know the language.

 

This message will be displayed if you have fewer than five posts:

  1. Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
  2. If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

Once you have made 5 posts or more you will be able to edit your profile and add all your details.

 

Please refrain from posting spam as your five required posts. Seriously, we have thousands of forums and hundreds of thousands of threads available. If you can't find five things to say in all of that, there probably is no reason to have an account on the site.

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