What is the concensus here on the e-mail validation? I would think, as
long as the user isn't using a proxy, participatng in the forum, and not
trying to hack or flood, it isn't really needed...
There is a forum that a group of people recently re-vamped to try to
"look cool", so me and my friend in Florida had fun owning them.. I
stress they're not the brightest tools in the shed, one has a "hidden
blog".
So we were signing up accounts and having fun...
He signed up as like "Barney Club Prez", and other goofy names.. I
totally confused them, signing up as "Hannah Montana (from hannah, Montana)",
"Baby Bop (from far far away)", and "Jay Leno (from Jay Leno's House). It
was hilarious, since I would post afew, then rotate through... Like 15 minutes
in they were crying on their blog, not even their forum. LMAO
Yeah, I only activate it if theirs a flood of spam bots, or something of that sort. Otherwise, unless your forums big on a massive scale you don't need it.
If you want all your members to have real emails this is a good way to ensure all the members have real emails.
This can however be annoying to real users and could harm activity on the forum as people can lose interest in the forum by the time they get to check their emails.
Also alot of spam bots now use real emails as they can easily sign up at Google mail and that is commonly used now by spammers. Email validation won't really help to a massive extreme really.
If you have somebody form another forum targeting you by signing up alot then turning it on will mean they have to keep making new emails to activate their accounts. The only issue is they could use temporary emails when signing up which gets around it with near enough no trouble. Some people don't know they exist though so that might work if the person that is spamming don't know they exist as they might then keep signing up for yahoo mail accounts or hotmail accounts -lol-
Another issue is hat alot of the time free email providers block the emails coming from hosts or send them to peoples spam boxes so the users may never be able to activate their account anyway.
I think the need for Email validation really depends on both the size and importance of the forum. For example Digital Point forums are bound to have Email validation activated, whereas some new gaming site isn't - or has it on to "try and stop spam bots".
I don't agree with Fowler and Efc2008 regarding Administrators wanting users to use real Email addresses, because there are plenty of sites such as spam.la where you can easily validate an acocunt without even having to log in anywhere.
The way I see it, Email validation is really a way to filter out the members who want to be part of the community from the members who sign up for the sake of signing up.
It would encourage more people though to use real emails... It would still reduce the amount of emails being returned because the email doesn't exist which is very common for this forum because people sign up with fake emails like [email protected] and then subscribe to topics and then they just get returned -angry- -angry-
