Broken / super slow GC account registration system (it will be fixed)

[John]

Probably has been like this for a while, but I was not aware of the issue. And it was likely much worse on the old server setup.

3 minutes, or just slightly more than that, is how long the website takes to return the "account creation successful" page after someone joins GC. The actual registration happens within a few seconds as expected & the verification email is sent. But the page does not not do anything for at least 3 minutes. I tested this with a timer probably 20 or more times over the past 1-2 weeks.

Anyone who would like to do the same test is welcome to do so. Maybe add "Testing" to the end of the username so I can easily find all the accounts to delete later in the database. When you click the submit button, just wait, don't refresh or anything. Once 3 minutes + 5-15 seconds or so passes the page will update.

The culprit is an anti spam-bot detection type service for forums and/or the programming code here that integrates GC into being able to use that service.

Long time GCers probably remember way back in the day when we were constantly flooded with spam. It was a nightmare. Some days I would wake up to thousands of spam messages posted everywhere all throughout the forums. It was exhausing to deal with & a bit demoralizing with the constant mess piled on to the site almost daily.

The anti forum spam bot system/service was setup years ago as one of the ways to help block & slow down the spam bots. It's an imperfect system to begin with as it's basically crowd sourced through many websites. I doubt anyone running that service verifies bot versus legit. So there's a chance a webmaster somewhere could accidentally add someone into the anti-spam-bot database & they end up getting blocked from many other websites because of that. Even if not perfect, this system has saved me (and surely many GC moderators) a lot of headaches.

Let's say the anti-spam-bot system/service is 99% accurate. In the time GC has been using it the system has blocked registration of more than 12,000,000 accounts. (I'll double-check that number and will post another thread with info about all that another time.) So even if 1% of those rejections were bad that would be 120,000 legit GC accounts having been turned away. Who knows, maybe the accuracy is 99.99, I don't know.

But now, those 3 minute updates are a big problem. It might as well just be broken. I know this will cause many potential GCers who want to join the site to simply leave because that's what I do when a website is excessively slow. Plenty of research has been done on this topic, but basically anything beyond a few seconds and a huge percentage of those site visitors go away.

I can't, or shouldn't, just turn off the anti-forum-bot system in order to get those 3+ minute times down to 2-3 seconds. That could potentially result in a colossal spam-bot caused mess on GC. I really don't want to go through that again.

And this forum software is so old that it does not integrate the better / more modern anti-spam bot type systems.

Not sure how I'm going to handle this issue just yet, but I do have some ideas and have been thinking about it a bunch. Will post an update here soon once I know how I'll be proceeding with it.