1. You login name must approximately (and should exactly) match your email name. For example, if your registration email address is HelloWorld@c.com, your login name should (approximately) be HelloWorld. I will allow slight differences for gmail and other users, e.g., if your registration email address is HelloWord0123@gmail.com, I will allow HelloWorld as your login name. If you feel this is a privacy intrusion, feel free to create some dummy account at gmail (or some other service) to use a login name of your choice.
I've found that this scheme eliminates about 90% of the spam bots that try to register on this site. To handle the other 10%, I also require that you send an email to the following email address:
03curb_eater@icloud.com
with "Forum registration request" (or something very similar) on the subject line. Note that emailing to this address is not sufficient to register for this forum, you must also go through the forum registration process.
Sorry about the gymnastics I'm requiring here, but it becomes a full-time job trying to moderate this site if I have to deal with all the spam bots and hackers trying to attack it. I'm sure you can appreciate not being blasted by pharmaceutical ads and geopolitical treatises.
I also apologize for simply deleting all the old posts from the original board. The original board got hacked and it was simply too much work to reenter all that data.
I strongly recommend against signing up with a .xyz or .ru domain. The vast, vast, vast, majority of registrations I've seen from these domains are obvious spambots and I almost always delete any registration request from these domains without giving them a second look. And every account I have approved, turned out to be spewing spam on the board within days. Gmail is bad enough, but I'm almost read to go into automatic delete mode on .xyz and .ru registration requests.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde