Forum registration hell and other issues

[AISguy]

Hello everyone!

I want to talk about forum registration process and the new user restrictions.

1. The first thing I want to discuss is banned IPs.
Let me start from the example:
I wanted to register on this forum, but my IP was banned "for spamming". Of course I didn't spam - it was banned as a part of a range or just because someone else spammed from my public IP.
In order to register on this forum, I had to switch 6 proxies - only then did I find a not banned IP.

It seems to me that this "banned IPs" thing almost stops the income of users, which is bad for the community.
To solve this issue, I suggest to disable IP bans.
In my case, I gave up on registering after 4 proxies for the first time, and tried again after a week only because I really wanted to share the info.

You may ask: "But what about spammers and other bad guys?"
I suggest solutions like Shadowbans or bans based on something akin to Evercookies.
I understand that this requires more effort than to ban some IP ranges, but after some time without new users, the community will gradually wither until it's dead. Old member will [lose interest]/[have important IRL stuff], and there will be no people to replace them.
Even if we just disable IP bans without doing anything else, there's still an option to ignore specific users, so people will be able to protect themselves from toxicity without the culprit noticing it and thus not motivating him to post more.
Because what happens if person is toxic and is banned? Do you think IP bans stop him? No. Ignorance and the lack of response do (or some really serious stuff that takes too much energy to breach, like Evercookie).

So, overall, I suggest to disable IP bans during registration because they hurt the community.

2. New user restrictions.
I don't know all restrictions of new users, but what I encountered is the block of the message because "it's too spamy".
And your message is deleted - you have a blank window like you wrote nothing.
Imagine a person finally registered on this forum, writing his long post meticulously ... and having his message prevented from being posted and then wiped because "your message is too spamy".
(some satellite is taken down by the butthurt-ray)
This basically happened to me, and I was forced to PM Exotic_Retard for him to post my message from pastebin into the placeholder theme that I created.
The message wipe also happens if your attachment was too big, which is also distressing.

Overall, I suggest to reconsider the new user restrictions.
I also suggest to enable the automatic save of the message draft, so the message will not be wiped if declined.

[Voodoo]

Welcome AISguy,

I'm sorry that you had such a trouble with the registration. If other users have similar problems they can pm me in FAF.

It is true that the system blocks too many ips at the moment. This happens via a black list check.
We are aware of this problem and working on it.