anyone else find it anoying that you MUST have a payed email to sign up ?

ive changed proviers amny times over the years and the most convient thing ive had is my free YAHOO email that ive had since the second week they started giving them out

no matter what happened ive always had and use that email

i NEVEr use isp provided email and after years with my currrent isp i couldnt even begin to figure how to set one up even if i wanted to which I DONT

personaly i think they need an option at least something like moderator approval or something for free email accounts esspecialy in a day and age where mudders are fewer and fewer in number

It is annoying, however like all systems there are bugs that can be exploited within it. For starters, you don't actually need a paid email service. You can use free email services to sign up, however they have to be obscure enough that they're not on whatever blacklist the registration system references. Secondly, once you do have an account, you're free to change your email to any email address you'd like; free or otherwise.

It allows, or at least did allow, Gmail.

If you really get stuck I can set you up a forwarder address on any of the domains I run (about 5 or 6) till you can change your email to whatever you want after registering.

Welp, there's yer problem, then. Work on that, and I bet
the issue clears up.

I'm guessing that if the hapless newbs on cablevision,
roadrunner, etc, etc, can figure out their emails, you can
too. If you really are unable to work out such a minor
technical issue, then I'm not understanding how you manage
to run a mud.

If you want to be on TMC, work it out. It's really not
that hard a problem. I'd be more impressed if you had
started this thread saying:

"Hey guys, I need help. It looks like I'm having trouble because…"

Instead, your thread is:

"Doesn't it suck that…"

You're acting like the problem is beyond your fixing. I
don't have a lot of patience for that attitude, forgive
me if it seems like I'm giving you a hard time. But
srsly, this is your storm. If you don't care enough to try to
fix it, why would anyone else care about how negatively you feel?

Or was this just supposed to be a thread about how lame TMC is?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

I will agree actually with not using ISP emails, though other than that I agree with Cratylus as far as "If you won't take the time to set up an email, then why do you think we are going to go out of our way to help?" is concerned. I don't use ISP-provided emails because I don't feel like needing to email everyone I know with my new email whenever I change ISP's, nor do I feel like having to save any emails I don't want to lose forever onto my Hard Drive whenever I change ISP's.

While I can sympathize with the OP's problem, I also find myself agreeing with Cratylus that it seems trivially easy to solve in the short term. Having changed ISPs several times myself, often at the annoyance of my customers, I can appreciate the pain in the ass it causes when you need to shuffle emails around and be sure you don't lose anything important. But if all you're doing is trying to get registered on a site, a one-off use of your ISPs webmail system seems like a no brainer.

That said, I really wonder why TMC is not more forgiving of gmail since it's becoming a very popular solution to this very problem. It may be prone to bot spam, but don't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one? :)

If you don't have a gmail account, I can send you the invite to get one or whatever so you can use that.

It is, or at least used to be forgiving of gmail, my account there uses a Gmail email.



Gmail hasn't required an invitation to join in nearly a year.

Was it originally created using a gmail account, or did you just switch it to one later on? My current account also uses a gmail account, but only after switching it to it in the settings - I was forced to use an obscure free email service to set up a temporary email address to initially set up the account in the first place, which is why I mentioned that loophole to the OP. :sad:

What does he expect, evil botnets from hell signing up to spam the very valuable MUD market forums?

I used Gmail originally, but it was in 2005 when Gmail was first created so it must have been added to the block list since then.

I hardly use it… go figure ;)

Well its not a matter of not being able to set up an Email through my isp its more a matter of why should i have to ?
ive got an email , it works well, its free , and all my contacts know it . why should i have to deal with a hassel of creating a new email with my isp jsut for ONE website ? its unnessisaraly complicated and all for what valid reason ?



:grinning:

botters and spamers are easly stopped by requiring admin aproval for free email accounts

Slowed, but not stopped. For all intents and purposes, however, TMC only has one admin so something like that wouldn't actually be practical. Not that it would be for any forum anyways. That would be even more frustrating than the current system, to be perfectly honest. Having to track down an obscure and/or paid email service to use to bypass the blacklist is a trivial matter that can be done in one's own time. Having to wait for approval by someone else, however, can take any amount of time from hours to days. I'd rather not have to wait that long just to get a mere forum account.

Aye, as mentioned TMC has one administrator. I'd like to keep it that way as it means fewer conflicts of interest and less fights between administrators and users. And while it is kept that way it is too much work for one person. Let's say it only takes 10 seconds to authenticate your account. TMC has 76,502 users, so that's 765020 seconds to authenticate them all one by one. 760502 / 60 = 12,675.03333 or 12,675 minutes and 2 seconds. 12,675.033 /60 = 211.2505555 hours That's roughly 8 days 19 hours and 14 minutes a rather exorbitant amount of time to be spent on nothing but authenticating users.

He did say only free email accounts, not all users, but yes, I agree that it's pretty unreasonable to expect even a group of people to be spending time authenticating people. On what basis will they authenticate you anyhow? If they just give blanket approval, they might as well not bother with the extra step.

A better system would be one of those that sends an email with a link you need to visit to get the account activated. That way the administrator has nothing at all to do…

I used my old lycos email account to sign up there, I believe, and changed it to the Gmail one later on.

Some spam bots seem to be able to handle that as well.

You don't. Free country, man.

-Crat