New Registration Requirement September 2006
Dear Betty-ites:

UPDATE JAN 15, 2007: AS OF TODAY, ALL REGISTRATIONS ARE REVIEWED BY AN ADMINISTRATOR. WHEN YOU REGISTER, A NOTICE WILL BE SENT TO AN ADMINISTRATOR, WHO WILL NORMALLY REPLY WITHIN A DAY OR SO. WE REGRET ANY INCONVENIENCE AND HOPE THIS WILL NOT DETER YOU; THIS ACTION IS TAKEN IN RESPONSE TO ABUSE OF THE BOARD BY COMMERCIAL SPAMMERS AND OTHER POND SCUM. THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING. FA

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

We are reconfiguring the Forum (1) to require confirmation of email address and (2) to hide the Memberlist feature. For already-registered users this will not require any great change. Use of the FOBM site and Forum remain free of charge, courtesy of Clark Internet Publishing.

This change will automatically link all new posts and comments to their author, and it will reduce our workload in support of this free service. Unfortunately, the Web is not as friendly a place as it once was, but we can keep FOBM as friendly as possible by a few adjustments.

We are making this change in response to an increase in the abuse of the Forum by people unrelated to your purpose. This is very similar to the sending of spam through email, but it puts the burden on the web host to support a lot of useless traffic. There are two typical gambits
1. posting a bogus user with a web address; this is done to increase traffic on the address by creating additional links in order fool search engines; by hiding the member list that objective is thwarted, because the robots will not find a link to "click" and the link(s) will not be indexed.
2. posting spurious messages in the topics; these include all links to commercial sites.

These changes will largely block the use of the forum by automated procedures. What this mainly does is to require a real, working email address to start adding content.

CONFIDENTIALITY: We strive to minimize public access to email addresses to reduce spam. Because the Forum uses third-party software we do not have an easy way to do this, so we cannot entirely hide addresses at this time. We ourselves make no use of your address except to inform you of Forum-related information.