Hi everybody, I'm finally able to post having initially registered in September 2017 and eventually getting my account approved 9 months later in June 2018! For the last 9 months I have felt like Zod, trapped in The Phantom Zone! My thanks go out to @ProjeKtWEREWOLF who I saw was a member on here, traced him to a forum I could contact him on, and asked him if he could give the admin/mods on here a nudge to activate my account. I got clearance to be in the company of the Queen much, much faster than it took to get clearance on here and in the time I have been lurking in the background I also managed to acquire an Atwood Ruler (on my first attempt!). That said, I'm really glad to be here and look forward to learning from you all. Swan
Welcome along. I am with you on this one, clearance for Royal Family duties was much quicker than getting here. But welcome anyway, I hope you find it of use!
Thanks for the welcome everyone Just for the record, I'm from the UK. @CJinPa , I don't have any pictures of it, I rarely, if ever, take pictures as I have no camera, an old Nokia push button phone which takes poor quality pictures and an original iPad which has no camera. It is an R37 with a satin finish and an antler stamp from the December 2017 issue. There are pictures of them on his site.
We are trying our best but as there is only one or two volunteer site staff checking members it can take time (seriously I checked 30 members over 6 hours today plus spent another hour clearing out the spammers, drive by advertisers, shills and other never do wells). You were lucky that I noticed that Mr Wolf had posted a profile message on the forum server admins profile page, had it not been for me glancing over the new profile posts you likely would have been waiting a bit longer. PSA: if a current member knows a new member they are best to PC an active Mod or Admin so we see the message.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that you're short handed to do the checks. What I didn't understand, from the outside looking in, is how so many people registered after me and got approved a long time before me. I presume there is no chronological order to how you approve accounts. When you don't have the ability to contact anyone to ask, it does look as if you have been missed or not approved. Just taking the members who have posted an introduction thread (I bet there are many who haven't), 25 people registered after me and got approved before me, some within 2 days. Perhaps it is something that could be looked at? Anyhow, I'm glad I'm here now and can start taking part and contributing where I can
I can see the picture on both my laptop and on tapatalk on the my phone. Not sure why you can't see it. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
The listing that is used for checking members is in alphabetical order (I will ask the forum owner if it can be changed but it likely will be a low priority). There is another way they can be done so it is oldest to newest but there is a lot of downsides and has caused issues in the past so we try not to use that method.
Ah, insight how you get admission here. I remember I also waited 6 to 9 months while reading the forum and badly craving to post. IIRC I even sent PM or email to an admin once or twice, cause I also saw a lot of other new members popping up before me. Or maybe I only wrote a draft that I never sent out.. cannot remember exactly. That was a few years ago, but I remember I almost gave up waiting and was pleasantly surprised when the confirmation eventually arrived. Glad to be here, though. Welcome aboard, Mr. Swan! And good job the admins do to prevent spam accounts. I totally appreciate that. My favourite forum closed down due to massive trolling and spam two years ago, when mods could not handle deleting all that stuff and forum owner was unavaible. Very sad what can happen to communities.
Contributing a little bit to the off-topic here. @Dr Jekell , I'm admin on another forum that runs on the Invisionpower forum platform. We have automatic approval, and it works amazingly well. The Invision SW blocks 100% of bot registrations. A few users with bad intentions get through from time to time, but they are quickly banned manually as soon as they start posting. I'm not familiar with your forum platform, so I don't know if it has a similar feature, but if it does, I would recommend to try it. Being admin is enough unpaid work as it is.
So as to not derail this thread anymore this will be my last reply here but it is not the bots that we have issues with but shills, spammers, crowdfunding owners, business owners etc (I mean seriously how many different key-chain tools do they think people need?).
