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Registration - Read up y'all

Posted: August 24, 2001

It's no secret that the messageboard's unmoderated forums - especially the ASP Q&A forum - were/are going down the tubes. The reason? The ease with which anyone could post a message to the forum. There was no required registration, just enter a name of your choice, a subject of your liking, and a message, and, voila, you're a button click away from having your post out there for the entire world to see.

In theory, this should facilitate an open dialog where questions and answers can be exchanged rapidly.

And the theory held up fairly well in the messageboard's earlier days. Granted, a UseNet spam-type message would creep up on the board every now and then, but, for the most part, the board was pretty focused. And as it grew, it became less focused.

What you must understand is that the messageboard runs off a third-party component, Doug Dean's EZSite Forum 3.0. Making changes to the low-level aspects of the board was (and is) painful and difficult since I do not have access to the source code (even though I've pleaded for Doug to let me have access to it...). One thing Doug's component does allow nicely is the ability to moderate forums. So I created a batch of moderated forums, in which I could ensure that only on-topic posts arrived.

I left some forums unmoderated for a few reasons:

1. I tried moving all forums to being moderated, and many users voiced their dislike of that setup.
   
2. Moderating some 1,000+ posts per day is not my idea of fun.

This moderation split made some forums on-topic, but at the expense of posters having to wait, at times, up to 10 hours for their posts or replies to their post to appear. (Hey, I sleep and have a life, too.)

As the messageboard grew, so did the off-topic posts. And insulting posts. And immature posts. And now it is so silly it isn't even funny.

So why did I wait so long to enact registration? You have to understand two things to realize why:

1. I no longer own ASPMessageboard.com, Internet.com does.
   
2. I am hired by Internet.com to manage content on 4Guys/ASPMB/ASPFAQs.com, not to write code.

I envisioned that I'd need to write a completely new messageboard system. I didn't (and don't) have the time for this, to do this for Internet.com when they're not paying me to do it. Today, though, some pleadings in the general forum inspired me to act. Initially, I was just going to explain why there had been no registration to date; before I began my essay, though, I decided to peek into Doug's component one more time, a little closer. There was a Users table, but there was a very weird and unnormal relationship between the Users and Forums.

I won't bore you with the details, but the data relationship is ugly and confusing. I thought up some clever (and insanely ugly) ways to hack around these limitations. The end result: ugly, ugly code, but it should work, in theory. Here's hoping. (Also understand that I have been working with ASP.NET pretty exclusively since about January 2001, so having to go back to ASP... bleh, the 20 minutes it took to wire up this hack was unenjoyable, to say the least.)

But for now the site requiring registration to post any messages (non-registered users can read existing messages to their heart's content). You must create an account and specify a unique Username and Email address. You will be emailed a instructions on how to complete setup of your account. I can delete users if they are vulgar or off topic. If they are deleted, they can, of course, create another account, but they'll need to use a new email address... and (hopefully) they won't go to the trouble of creating a new Hotmail account just to plauge this messageboard, but, if they were determined folks, they could continue to be a pain.

If nothing else, registration should slow down those who insist on making the board an unfun, off-topic, insulting place. We'll see, I guess.

So, if you want to start posting on the Net's most popular ASP-related messageboard, go ahead and create an account. If you have any problems - bugs you catch, error messages, etc. - do let me know. This code is so ugly and so untested that I'm sure there's a plethora of glitches y'all can help me catch.

Also, if you see a registered user post offensive posts, let me know!

Thanks, and Happy Programming.