There are some things you need to be aware of before registering here. New members are, truly, welcome, but hard experience has shown it to be necessary for me to be a bit of a pain in the butt and lay down certain requirements and also to place a few hoops for you to jump through in the registration process.
This is primarily because spammers have found means to breach the normal security mechanisms in PHPbb forum boards, and I've been far from alone among forum board administrators in getting increasing numbers of bogus registrations and having to take extra measures to defeat forum board spambots.
So, the following measures are in place:
- All new member registrations now have to be activated by me, so I can vet these.
- In some cases, where I'm not quite sure of the bona fide of the name or/and e-mail address, I may e-mail the person concerned, asking them to reply to my message to verify that they are genuine. In such cases, upon receipt of that verification I would then activate the relevant account forthwith.
- With certain exceptions, ALL new accounts must be in one's TRUE NAME (much preferably, first plus last name). No pseudonyms / nicknames are allowed any longer in new registrations, to make it easier for me to recognise genuine submissions. They are also not really appropriate on this Board, as trying to hide oneself like that is a confused thing to be doing and really isn't consistent with a genuine self realization process.
It is important, therefore, that, when signing up, you use only your unadulterated name as your 'official name' or 'nickname' for your account and thus your ID on this Board, and do not in any way alter of obfuscate it - say, by adding extra letters or numbers. It's best, too, not to run first and any subsequent name together - i.e. not to omit the space between each. If you don't heed that advice it's possible that I might identify you as a board spammer and summarily delete your account without notification. Therefore, if there's some legitimate reason why you need to add to or amend your name on this Board - perhaps because there's another member with the same name (or indeed you have some special need to use a pseudonym), please contact me first and explain why you need to alter or add to your name or use a synonym, and then I'll know to recognise your account as a bona fide one.
If you give only your first name you are more likely to get misidentified as a spambot, or to get an e-mail from me asking for confirmation that you are genuine before I'd activate your account - though where possible I'd use other evidence to see if your registration looked genuine.If you want to avoid people finding your 'presence' on this forum board through Internet searches, what I recommend that you do is to put "xx" (minus the quotes) in place of the space between first and last name.
The main exception to the 'true name only' stipulation would be for prospective members who may want to post in the Mental Health and Healing 2 forum as a present or past patient or 'service user'. I understand that, at least initially, many such people may feel particularly reluctant to register in their true name. In such cases, please contact me first and briefly explain your situation so that I know that your registration would be genuine, and then I can approve it when it comes through. - If the name that you give for yourself doesn't tally with the name or 'alias' part of your e-mail address, that too may be taken as evidence of your not being a genuine applicant. So, if your e-mail address doesn't contain your name or a recognisable contraction of it, it would be wise, again, to contact me first so that I can be satisfied that you are a genuine applicant. I don't mean to cause paranoia about this, for I'd do my level best to use common-sense in my discernment, but it would be common-sense in such a situation for you to send me a prior or more or less simultaneous e-mail just to ensure that I know you're genuine.
- On the registration form I have added the odd anti-spam steps that you have to go through. Unfortunately spammers have have a way of eventually 'cracking' the 'visual confirmation' ('Captcha'), and so I'm using a belt-and-braces approach, additionally giving one or two rather dotty things that you have to do, which I hope spambots will not 'understand'.
This may sound a bit paranoid about spambots, but the fact is that my traffic statistics for this Board show a steadily increasing daily total of hundreds of spambot attempts at registration or posting - nowadays quite commonly topping a thousand (yes, in a day!) - while the number of apparently genuine humans visiting this board in a day is typically from 2 to 8.
If you are a prospective genuine, bona fide member of this Board and you don't get a response from me for the purpose of activating your account after a few days, please send me a message from my website contact page, and I'll do what's necessary to sort that out.
It makes sense to read the Posting Guidelines before registering, so that you don't register and then find that the sort of posts that you want to make aren't allowed.
Incidentally, any nuisance individuals who want to make advertising or otherwise off-topic posts on this Board would do well to note that NO posts go online without my vetting, so it would be completely wasting their time by making such posts and indeed trying to sign up here in the first place. Any such person who slips through the registration 'net' would have their account summarily deleted without notification once I'd found out what they were up to.