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talkSFU redesign ideas

edited May 2015 in General
Hey guys, I'm planning on doing a redesign of the website in the near future I was wondering if I could get your thoughts this:

- As of right now, registration is limited only to students that have an sfu email id. Because of this there is very little spam on the site. BUT I have had a lot of prospective students who request access to the site, so I was wondering if we should maybe open it back up again. What do you think?

That's all for now, let me know what you think!

Comments

  • How hard is it to block spam, and how bad was it? Can there be some sort of "I'm a human" filter put in? I can see how this forum could be very help to potential SFU students. Ha, maybe you can get some money kicked in for SFU recruitment....
  • Hi Simon,

    I agree that we need to open up registration to prospective students. I personally joined this website as a prospective student so I could get information from SFU students. 

    Obviously we want to prevent people from spamming us. There are two types of spammers on the internet.

    1. Bots that post random stuff. In order to fight this, we should ask some basic questions upon registration that a prospective student will know about. Bots won't be able to answer these questions, therefore preventing them from creating an account. Questions like "Who is the president of SFU" or "Where is SFU's main campus located"

    2. People who go to SFU that create multiple accounts to spam the website. This is a bit harder to block. I'm not sure how big of a problem this has been in the past, but one possible way to block this is to create "Moderators". Moderators are dedicated users of the website that can block/remove posts of a particular user if it's considered spam. 







  • I don't think it'd hurt to open up registration to non-SFU people.
    However, there could be a distinction between SFU and non-SFU members? Say, if I provided my SFU email, then there could be an indication of some sort.

    Just a thought =)
  • Do sophisticated Captchas no longer work on bots anymore?
  • I am also a fan of opening up registration again :) 

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