Although the point of gaining other members is indeed vital, that's for when the site is ready for it. But as I understand it mjm's comment was not actually a critique on that precisely (sorry for that misunderstanding mjm) but about the question asked to root out auto-spam entries. I like the idea of a question if one can be formulated which could be understood equally well across the world. Maybe In what country is the Eiffel Tower? or where is the great wall of China? or Enter in letters the sum of 2 and 3.
I've replaced the myopera question with the last question. Let's see if we get any spam registrations.
Right now [the forum] sends [e-mails] on behalf of my Gmail account, but I should probably set it up as something like no-reply@dnd.fransdejonge.com which will ignore whatever spam comes its way.
I'm not a fan of CAPTCHAs, but spam is a serious issue. Unfortunately spambots are better at solving them than humans, making them virtually useless (unless I customized it with a custom blackletter font or something, but some humans might have trouble with that too.)
I believe the option to ask questions is more user-friendly and for now hopefully sufficient against spammers. Specifically questions that can't be easily found with autocomplete on Google. But I'll give it more thought or ask for more input on that matter if I decide this is viable.
I evaluated several options. I can bore you by listing them all if you're interested. FluxBB and SMF were the winners from a user's perspective, which for me includes that it should work in pretty much any browser ever made. Unlike junk like Disqus, most forum systems actually passed that test.
Anyway, as a user I preferred FluxBB, but from the admin side of things SMF was the winner.
I guess that might suggest a memory problem or something, except trying e.g. memory-intensive admin tasks does not fail. I'll disable hostname lookups (on by default) as suggested here, although as far as I can tell that should just result in slower loading times.
The reason I think it might be a propagation issue is because everyone has (or should have) multiple DNS servers set up in their router. So it's possible that one server received the new info and the other didn't. On the other hand, the router should really cache such things…
In any case, that's why I won't call this test a failure yet until Friday.
Oh, that's because you're a new user. It's an anti-spam measure. I'll disable that for now but I might have to reinstall the whole forum regardless. Or use another one. For now it's not going very well, that much is obvious.
I hope this problem is related to DNS propagation, but one thing's for sure: the server is reacting slower right now than I've ever seen since going with this provider (which we've been with for over a year now). That includes other domains, not just this one. The error log is showing nothing but browsers requesting favicon.ico.
FluxBB and SMF were the winners from a user's perspective, which for me includes that it should work in pretty much any browser ever made. Unlike junk like Disqus, most forum systems actually passed that test.