New registered member - at last!!

[ajgreeny]

For quite a long time (several months) I have been trying to register to this Debian Forum as a user but I could never get the registration system to accept many of the answers I gave and was repeatedly blocked.
I am aware that there was a problem related to the use of gmail which was shown at the top of the page but in spite of that I continued to try but was thrown off time and again. Whether my email being a gmail address was the problem I do not know but I did notice that the warning at the top had now disappeared so thought it worth trying again. This time - - - Success!
Now at last I have managed to register and created this first post, not as a complaint but simply to say how pleased I am to have at last managed to get here and be able to add comments and hopefully add to the huge fount of knowledge that is this forum.
I have been using Debian for a long time and also many of the distros based on Debian, notably Ubuntu (actually Xubuntu since the days of Ubuntu's move to the Unity DE) and Mint, both the Ubuntu based and Debian based versions. I find them all remarkably similar and now with my registration to this forum I hope to be able to assist in as many ways as possible here as I currently do already in the Ubuntu and Mint forums..

[Aki]

Welcome ! :D

[Uptorn]

Welcome to the forums. What has been your most exciting technical feat, or "aha" moment, with Debian?

[ajgreeny]

Welcome to the forums. What has been your most exciting technical feat, or "aha" moment, with Debian?

Not sure this is specifically my "aha" moment but after starting my Linux experiences with Ubuntu way back in 2005 from a CD on a computer magazine in the UK, and then realising it was based on Debian, I tried Debian (can't remember the version) and came to the conclusion it was very similar to Ubuntu.
In those days it was more difficult to install any non-free packages in Debian so being new to Linux I mainly used Ubuntu but I removed WinXP from the dual-boot completely in 2007 and haven't looked back since.
I've tried other Linux versions such as the various RPM distros and even Arch or Arch based ones but I've decided that the Debuan apt method of package management is the one with which I'm comfortable and I have now largely given up distro-hopping.

[Diesel330]

I too had problems registering here one year prior this account, some admin had put my email to a black list because of a joke I made in their forum (not here). Must be a collective black list for all the spammers and personae non gratae that this forum looks at when you register. At the end I changed email for other reasons and I managed to register here, I still remember the frustration not knowing what is the problem. Register in here must be easy because there are noobs looking for help out there

[sunrat]

@Diesel330 There is a collective blacklist called StopForumSpam which is likely where you were reported to. We use it and it is very effective to limit spammers, but we are also quite conservative about reporting bad actors to it. Possibly the other forum that added you to the list is less careful.
The other downside is that if your IP address is blocked by the list, and you have a dynamic IP address, some allocated IP address may be on the blacklist even though it was not your address when it was added to the blacklist.
StopForumSpam should only be used for spammers. For users who post other undesirable content there is an inbuilt mechanism in the forum software to ban users either temporarily or permanently. We also use that conservatively perhaps a handful of times per year, preferring to warn users first and give them a chance to redeem themselves.
At least you made it here eventually!

[Diesel330]

@Diesel330 There is a collective blacklist called StopForumSpam which is likely where you were reported to. We use it and it is very effective to limit spammers, but we are also quite conservative about reporting bad actors to it. Possibly the other forum that added you to the list is less careful.
The other downside is that if your IP address is blocked by the list, and you have a dynamic IP address, some allocated IP address may be on the blacklist even though it was not your address when it was added to the blacklist.
StopForumSpam should only be used for spammers. For users who post other undesirable content there is an inbuilt mechanism in the forum software to ban users either temporarily or permanently. We also use that conservatively perhaps a handful of times per year, preferring to warn users first and give them a chance to redeem themselves.
At least you made it here eventually!

Thanks for explaining it. It was a non-English forum for Linux local to my country of origin, I went there pretending that I don't know the language well and had a lot of fun with my supposedly bad translated posts by machine. They wasn't welcoming so I made some witty intentional mistakes that gave away that I know the language and they got furious...

Glad to be here