First, a confession: this account was my second attempt at registering here. Does that make this a sock puppet? My first attempt, I entered the appropriate information and clicked ok, and was taken to a page saying that the validation email had been sent, yadda yadda yadda. I clicked the link saying "take me back to the last page I visited" and got a page saying I had been banned, no reason given, ban will never be lifted. I see the Ban List, and the complaints about the size of the ban list, and a comment about members with a ban date of 1996. Sure enough, my first account is on that list with that date. Obviously I'm not the only one who has fallen afoul of this problem. If the ban is legitimate, then there should be some feedback to the user, not just "no reason given". I highly suspect it is not a legitimate ban, but rather a bug in the registration logic that results when a query to the banlist automatically inserts an entry when the account has not yet been activated. If a bug is never reported, it's never fixed, so there you go.
Of course there is the technique where the Moderators pretend you don't exist and hope you'll run along. No-one's gonna say welcome. Just pull on your boots and go kick some heads, you'll fit right in.
I suspect Stryder's AI thought you were a bot. You will notice the glorious lack of spam on this board, thanks to Stryder. But, we're glad that your first banning didn't deter you Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The current hack in place is by no means infallible, however the percentage of users that have problems with it are extremely low. (In fact you are only the second to have ever mentioned it in the time period it's been running) If you truly want to help us know where the problem exists, I'd ask: What browser (and version) are you using? Is your browsers security settings set HIGH? Were you trying to register using the COPPA information for someone under the age of 13? Incidentally the reason it let you get as far as clicking the Register button and a Message for Sending an Email to Authenticate is that the hack in question was actually an "Alpha" hack (pre-production), It's not a polite hack, it doesn't explain anything to the user, it merely places them into a banned group and discards sending an email. As to authenticate every spammer that attempts to login here was still consuming bandwidth, so it made sense to silently discard the email.
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16 with the following addons: Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5 Download Statusbar 0.9.6.3 JavaScript Debugger 0.9.87.4 NoScript 1.7.9 There's no discrete HIGH/LOW setting. NoScript probably blocked any JavaScript you might have been depending on during the registration process. No. I did get the CAPTCHA wrong the first time, but that also happened with this second registration. Maybe I got it wrong a second time? I am colorblind, and they were somewhat hard to read... Ok, so there IS logic in place to enable the ban... I'm curious what action of mine triggered it...
I think you pretty much answered where the problem was. Vbulletin forum software uses Javascript for various functions, one of which is at signup. If Javascript is disabled then the signup process will fail. Obviously I don't want to go too in depth with it because otherwise my "secret sauce" is not much of a secret any more, not that I'd think bot writers would be too worried about one forum with it's own flavour of Anti-spam. Also if you want the first username you attempted, you'll have to tell us what it was and I'll see if I can get it sorted out for you.
But yet it worked with this account, with the same blocking software in place Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I would much rather use the original name, but I'd rather not reveal the name "in public" as it could possibly incriminate both accounts on other sites Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to use the PM feature until I've made 20 posts, so it will have to wait until then.
Well I'd suggest to get the 20 posts to enter into discussion around the forum, to get the post number up as the usual "Count each post until I reach 20" usually results in them all being deleted and the user ends up back at square one. So you can either hazard another guess as to why one instance was blocked and another was not (Thats a post right there Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) , or post on one of your favourite topics.
I guess I'll take that bait.. a bit of experimentation seems to indicate that the disabling of Javascript indeed caused the issue... I will say that it does seem to be a bit unfair to users that dislike having JavaScript enabled, but... I suppose it's your site to do with as you will. My last comment is to reiterate that your CAPTCHAs are hard to read for colorblind individuals. Could you possibly provide a link saying "I can't read that one, give me a different one" or something? Thanks, and I look forward to participating on this forum.
