I am pleased to have stumbled across this discussion regarding a former member who branched off, starting a similar competitive board.

I am concerned about a similar type of situation with my site, the infopop portion of which I just launched a few weeks ago.

Do most people not allow guests to view the posts?
Should email addresses not be viewable to anyone, including members?
How should we screen members to make sure no 'riffraff' gets in?

Thanks! ROMP ON!
-Monroe Mann
www.UnstoppableArtists.com

There is no "right method" to use. The answers to your questions vary from one community to another. With that said, here are my thoughts:

• Restricting the ability to view posts can be very probibitive to young communities. People must go through an extra step (registration) before they can view your content, and that will turn some away. Further, someone joining your site doesn't guarantee you anything. They could still leave to go to a competetors site at any time - so I say leave the viewing access open.
  
• Most Infopop boards these days have two fields for email addresses. One for the actual email address (for sending notifications, etc) and one called Display Email, in which users can leave it blank, put their email address in, or obfuscate it in some way (userNOSPAM@domain.com). I think this is the best method because it lets the user decide, and people vary when it comes to their email preferences.
  
• Every community will experience "riffraff" or trolls at one point or another. A few things you can do to diminish the chances of it happening to your community are: Build a solid Terms of Service (TOS) and stick to it - outline the rules and consequences, listing which actions are acceptable and which ones are not; require validation of email addresses and restrict people from signing up with free ones - such as yahoo.* or hotmail.com, among others - this isn't a perfect filter, but it does catch a lot; and finally, you can choose to either be notified by email of all new registrations and/or you can moderate new registrations, to weed out trouble makers. I only recommend the the last suggestion if you are starting to see problems arise, as it can take up a lot of time.
  

Best of luck!

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your suggestions. Regarding the restricting of free accounts ala hotmail and yahoo... does that cause limitations to whom may join. In other words, in your experience, do most people that have a hotmail account also have a 'pay' account as well? In my line of work, I'm dealing with artists, many of whom are not yet where I know they can be financially. As a result, I'm sure many of them DO use the free accounts... If I must allow these addresses, how can I ensure that they aren't 'ghost' addresses?

Thanks,
-Monroe

Those freebie email accounts do cause havok sometimes, when you can't pin down who a troublemaker might be. One other thing you could do to cut down on weirdos and troublemakers would be to require some other piece of personal information (even if you won't use it for anything or display it) as part of the registration process. People could still put fake info there, but it might be a brief deterrent to someone casually coming in to cause problems.

The other way to go would be to allow those freebie emails, but keep an eye on it, and if they start to cause trouble, disallow them in future. Kind of a wait and see strategy.

Another good thing to do, if you have one or two particular troublemakers, is to ban their IP address. This is the most harsh method of banning, but it is also the hardest to bypass. Unless they use dialup, their IP will likely always be the same, at least for long periods of time.

Once their IP is banned, they cannot post, or even register on your site regardless of what email address they use, etc.

I typically use this as a last resort. First I will just ban the user, and if it obvious they keep finding ways to come back to avoid the ban, I go the extra step with the IP.

Generally speaking, I think should have email validation, when the user register a account, the board send a email to the user email account and the user need to click a link before their account activiate.

This is very common in many web based application/website now.

I would like to allow Guests to read everything, but require registration to post a topic/reply. Is this possible?

Our board has become inundated with spam over the last few months (Viagra, ringtones, online poker). It might be a bot or someone manually pasting the links. But it is almost destroying our community

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Rich