New User E-mail Activation Required

I've added an e-mail activation requirement for all new users. This will hopefully, and likely help our ever increasing spam/bot problems.

European e-mail accounts often block MAL e-mails for some reason, so I'd recommend those that aren't already using Gmail, switch over to it: http://gmail.com.

Sounds good... probably should have been done long ago. I don't think there's much of a barrier to new users.

on a side note, it might be a good idea to bring back a welcome message on the main page when you're not logged in -- instead of just being ads and recommendations. It doesn't seem very friendly and tells prospective users nothing about what the site can do.

nice ye i believe this will stop some spamming too

Most sites already have something like this so I was surprised when this one didn't. This'll definitally help with the spam and bots.

Yup, there are a lot of new users signing up to MAL. This is a good idea, though I wonder why only now.

I sense the trolling and spamming will remain somewhat the same...

thats a beasty idea

its good for the spam but its too bad for the european ones they need a new email :p

It's not like every european will have MAL emails blocked... I'm not a new user indeed, and the notification have never been blocked for me, and i use my main mail account.

But anyway, nice job on working against spambots :)

We never had trolls =/

Hi, you must be new.

Good! Thank you.

About time.

excelente, or as they say, subarashii.

Thank. You. This will at least make it less convenient for trolls.

Thanks alot for the new feature.

i'm surprised there wasn't one before, every site seems to have one now. this should help a lot for spam :D

Sarcasm on Internet... will never be understood. LoGH lol.

And fixing up the front page like mentioned would be great. I remember the first time I came upon MAL and I didn't see much (besides a bunch of people who loved reading Naruto! yeeeeah) and clicked the back button FAST. Wandered back a few months later. So a little more enticing entrance would be good.

Oh wow. There was no activation email for mal? That's pretty surprising, but I guess now there will be less PM spam so YAY!

While this measure is good, it won't stop the most determined trolls out there from creating multiple accounts. However, this implementation should slow them down a little by giving them a few more steps.

It's better than nothing.

You make it seem like you can't just sit there and use spam.la after spam.la email account and make new accounts.

I forsee no change in the future, except for a small decline in bots.

If someone wants to do that now, they'll have to manually go through every e-mail account and activate each account. It'll be a HUGE hassle. Let the poor bastards waste their time on it.

spam.la doesn't require email activation, unfortunately.

spam.la doesn't need activation, but MAL does. So when they register for an account with that email address, the user still has to activate each MAL account, instead of just posting like they have been.

Kinda surprised this haven't been made yet. Most of the sites/forums I've been to have CAPTCHAs on or email activation on. But it's pretty good that you've finally made this change. It will slow down those types of accounts, hopefully.

Reminds me of how many spam emails there are, though. I read a list somewhere in the area of forum service forums, but now I've forgotten all of them.

It's a lot less work than creating a new email account for each MAL account.

Finally! thanks Xinil.

This pleases me.

Not really, because I have multiple email accounts. It's not really too much of a hassle for somebody who already has one (<-majority of people). And really if somebody wants to actually use MAL then it's not a deterring factor, if you want to join just to spam... what's the point if you already don't have an easy way around this.

I'm neutral about this.

To be perfectly honest, I have not noticed a problem with trolling.

I believe the fact that it probably happened here, but which rating systems are you talking about?

Just curious :)

Awesome Xinil, thanks :)

To save problems with forgotten passwords in the future, I'd like to reinforce switching your email address if you have the following email domains currently set up for MAL notifications:
AT&T webdomains (att.net, pacbell.net, sbcglobal.net, etc.)
op.pl
onet.eu
ukr.net
a-teleport.com

Bout time and damn why didn't yall do that long time ago.

this will not stop troll because it only like 2 minutes to make an email account, and if they really want to fuck with us they will

Agreed....I don't think it does make sense since MAL doesn't delete even the inactive accounts*...

*correct me for that one...

I would agree with Cashdaxxx, some way must be found (if possible) to delete those spam accounts. Not only would it lessen server loads, it would also reduce spamming.

so long random picture spammers ^^ tired of reporting those 1-day acc's

There need be no correctin'

Xinil would never want to see his beloved registered users count deminish.

As far as I'm concerned, Xinil finally added quite a common feature. I am surprised it took six years to implement.

Even if a lot of them were spam accounts??

Good job, maybe bit late but hey, better late than never people :)

spam account/score troll accounts get deleted
inactive accounts don't get deleted.

^This, Xenil gets a lot of reports. But if actually are troll, then they do get deleted.
Trust me, it's still not that hard to create a troll account. But the time to create multiple increases a lot thanks to this feature.

User Count doesn't mean too much, site traffic statistics are more important and those aren't really changed by getting rid of troll accounts.

Thank you as always for your hard work

It took until the recent disaster for them to be deleted, which is extremely recently, and it was only about 5 accounts, tops.

that's just absurd and uninformed

I don't know what kind of number system your elementary school taught you to count on but this certainly doesn't add up to five for most people.

Not only are you seemingly trying to be adverse just for the sake of it, you're making baseless statements when you clearly have no idea what goes on around this site. Users and mods are constantly on the lookout for ratings trolls and spammers are often reported immediately. The database admins spend a good amount of time perusing endless lists of suspected accounts in an attempt to figure out which ones are actually trolls. Belittling the work people put into trying to keep this site running is outright rude and asinine.

Everyone knows this e-mail system isn't foolproof. We're not idiots. Xinil probably knows that better than anyone as he's the one who put it all together. But it's still better than what we had before: nothing.