Suggestions for forum

Rather frustrated when it comes to prospective membership here. I think we have decent board activity and slowly but surely keep adding people but I unfortunately still reject more registrations than I approve. This is even after I loosened the "answer the registration question or don't get approved" rule since I realized no one not even legitimate posters ever answered the question. So while I still have a registration message to make it easier for me to determine legitimate posters who answer the question as long as their screen name/e-mail is normal enough I'll approve them. Unfortunately sometimes registrations are TOO normal/vague or weird. I've been an admin long enough to develop a decent formula for detecting spam/trolls. I even banned registration for one ip address because it was an obvious sneaky trolling or spamming attempt. Some of these people may be legitimate posters but in addition to not answering the question I don't have enough information to make a determination. (For example a business e-mail address is one thing but hotmail registrations always make me suspicious. Who the heck still uses hotmail? LOL) If I don't have enough information to make a valid determination, I unfortunately have no choice but to reject membership.

So I implore anyone reading this to PLEASE include your reason for interest in your registration message to make it easier for me or if anyone here knows people who would like to legitimately talk about the show to please tell them to join and fill in that box. I've had about six "members" who tried to join this week and rejected about four of them. And this is after loosening the rules to register. I can't play guessing games.

I'm starting from the bottom up so I apologize to HeadMarshal for being my unintentional guinea pig in the recent tv fugitives section as a lot of his cases are there but check it out if anyone wants

Thanks! Knowing my luck months from now after I'm finally done editing the threads for new police numbers for people to call for the old amw fugitives AMW will come back in addition to The Hunt and I'll have to edit the threads again for their new number. Then again that would be a good problem to have!

I'm perfectly fine with keeping the AMW Fans name. It was the show that inspired the forum in the first place

Just finished entering all our current case files or other threads I felt should be preserved into archive.org. ProBoards has an internal backup of all its' forums, but I like being on the safe side. I will also try to save any new cases when they appear on our site as well. Anyone else can feel free to save in archive.org after they make a new thread as well. I realized I never did anything to "save" or preserve our case threads before this week. Between that and updating the fugitive threads to include police or Crime Stoppers lines if they aren't Hunt cases, I've been a busy man! I wish I had thought of all these ideas when I wasn't working nearly every day for two straight months. Hopefully and this is a friendly estimate, all the appropriate phone numbers inserted into fugitive and other case threads should be done by the end of September.

What annoys me (and this is not an insult to anyone) is that there are some very avid followers of this forum's facebook page yet they haven't signed up on the actual forum. That really doesn't make any sense to me. I would love to chat cases with them on here.