For most of the first ten years of the Wongery's existence, the forum was getting constant spam posts. Dozens a day, from myriad users with gibberish usernames. The posts were held in moderation before being made public, so nobody but the Grandmaster Wongers ever saw them, but still, they were cluttering up the databases and made it hard for the Grandmaster Wongers to find the non-spam posts hidden among all the spam... or would have, were there any non-spam posts to be found, but it's the principle of the thing. So, in April 2023, I did what I should have done years before, and finally implemented some anti-spam measures, enabling a plugin that would require users to answer a question before registering. And it worked... apparently. Since I enabled that registration question, the forum hasn't been getting any more spam posts.

But it hasn't been getting any legitimate posts, either.

Okay, that's not entirely true. The forum has, in fact, received exactly five legitimate posts since the antispam measures were implemented, not counting my own posts, of course. But that's... well, it's not nothing, I guess, but it's pretty close to it. Especially since three of the five posts were from the same user, who hasn't posted since February 2024... and I don't blame him, given the inactivity of the forum. (And the fact that I never replied to any of his posts... uh, I should probably do that. Not that it's likely to do much good now, but better late than never.)

I should at this point note the specifics of the registration question, because it will shortly become relevant. There were multiple registration questions, actually, one of which would be chosen at random for each registration attempt. What all these questions had in common was that they were about subjects from the Central Wongery, and could be answered by looking something up there. I had done this because I had searched for advice on antispam registration questions before implementing the plugin, and had encountered warnings that questions that were common knowledge or were too easily answered were ineffective because they could be answered by sufficiently sophisticated bots. I therefore put in questions like "On what continent is Xolia?"—someone looking up "Xolia" in the Central Wongery would find that information in the first sentence of the article, but it wouldn't be something that a bot would know. All of the questions were along these lines—they were all answerable by just looking up the topic of the question in the Central Wongery, and all were answered in the first sentence of the relevant article. "What does the K stand for in SKE?" "What does the A stand for in FRA?" "Numlle is the Norgan capital world of what god?" "Who owns the Eversky?"

Which brings us to the fact that a few days ago I decided I guess more or less on a whim to check the forum registration system. There was one thing in particular that I was looking for. It might be relatively easy to find the answers to the registration questions by looking them up in the Central Wongery, but this wasn't necessarily something that most visitors would readily realize. But I had made sure there were instructions on the registration page explaining how to find the answers to the questions. At least, I was pretty sure I had. Hadn't I? Well, there was no harm in checking.

As it turns out, apparently I hadn't.

The registration page did say that "[t]his question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots", but gave no guidance as to how to answer it. So either my instructions on how to answer the registration question had somehow been removed in some update, or, much more likely, I had never put in those instructions on the first place, and had assumed that people registering for the forum would be able to figure it out on their own. Which would be an utterly idiotic assumption to make, but I'm an utter idiot, so that tracked.

I could have put in the instructions now, of course, but I had some second thoughts that I should have had a long time ago. Even if I did explicitly state that the answer could be looked up in the Central Wongery, this was still a bit of extra trouble that people might not be eager to go to. It was still placing an extra barrier in the way of forum registration. Yes, it was a necessary barrier, in the light of all the spam the forum had been receiving... or was it?

Allow me to quote briefly here from the blog post where I first announced the (then-)new antispam measures:

(I also noticed when I looked at the user registration settings in the administration control panel that I hadn't even made email verification required for user registration! That... really seems like something I should have done a long time ago, too. I mean, I'm sure there are modern spambots sophisticated enough that they would have had no trouble completing the email verification, but still, I shouldn't be making things too easy for them. (It's required now, of course.))

So at the same time that I had enabled the antispam Q&A plugin, I had also turned on required email verification. The spam posts had stopped... but how did I know whether that was really because of the questions or because of the email verification?

Well, there was one easy way to test this. I could turn off the registration question but leave the email verification on and see what happened. At worst, I'd get a bunch of spam posts I'd have to delete, and then I could turn the registration question back on, or look for a different antispam measure. At best, there'd be no new spam posts and I'd know that the email verification alone was sufficient.

So I did just that; I disabled the registration question and left the email verification on. That was four days ago, and there have been no spam posts since. So I guess that answers that question.

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that I would have been getting lots of legitimate posts all this time had it not been for the unnecessary hurdle of the registration question. That's almost certainly not the case. I'm pretty sure the site just isn't getting visitors. After all, I've also been getting no engagement with the Wongery subreddit, Tumblr, or Mastodon account, and those don't have any such hurdle. Still, that's one less thing in the way of getting more forum activity in the future. It's maybe still not likely to happen, but at least it's now marginally less unlikely.

Of course, it could be that the Q&A plugin did deter spammers, and that after a few years with it in place the Wongery was removed from their lists... but may potentially end up added again now that it's gone. Or that new spammers will show up to whom email registration is not an impediment. And, well, if spam does start accumulating again, I guess I'll have to implement some countermeasures. But they won't be the same countermeasures. Well, I'll cross that bridge when and if I come to it.

But anyway, in the unlikely circumstance that you've been reading these blog posts but haven't been posting in the forum because you couldn't figure out how to answer the registration question (or didn't want to bother with it)... that's no longer something you have to worry about. The way to forum registration is now clear. Go forth and post.

(Not that I'm expecting to start getting a lot of posts, since like I said I don't think anyone is visiting the site anyway. But hey, no harm in trying.)