What gives?

[Terry]

Just what we needed, yet another disgruntled grouch on FFF. Welcome, Terry, and join the crowd.

Disgruntled? No, I think any rational person who attempts to join a site and immediately has their integrity come into question by being dismissed as a spammer would probably react similarly.

 

[Terry]

Were they too harsh for you?

Not necessarily harsh, but too extreme for me, and I eventually got fed up with it.

 

[Terry]

• Or post from IP addresses known to spam blacklists as spam hosts.
• Or use a blacklisted email address.
• Or use an email address munged with dummy characters to bypass one-user-one-address restrictions, e.g. s.p.am.m.y.l.o.se.r@gmail.com.
• Or fill out certain fields in the registration form improperly, with random characters, generic words like "yes," and so forth.
• Or fill out the registration in Cyrillic.
• Or put questionable Web sites (e.g. adult content) into the "Website" field.
• Or give yourself a username that basically shouts that you're here to post unsolicited advertising: numbers, nonsense names, a business name.
• Or put ad content in the "About Me" part of your registration.

None of that applies in my case. I would hope that someone could at least be honest enough to admit that the moderators didn't do their due diligence, that they saw that a brand new user had joined, and immediately went to the banhammer under the assumption that it was spam. Having one of you admit that would go a long way for me.

And since you are the first legit user to get caught by mistake, we can do so with literally better than 99.9999% accuracy. You managed to fool us. Congratulations.

That's not really my problem, is it? Again, that goes back to finding the right balance between bot detection and basic administrative duties. Like I said, I'm telling you this as a favor so that the next person that tries to join doesn't have to go through these same headaches that I've been dealing with.

And then what?

Then I'll know where we all stand. I'll have an idea about which of the moderators are credible and which ones aren't, in case I need to approach one of them in the future.

 

[Ransom]

Congratulations. You've spent more time complaining about being banned, now, than you spent being actually banned.

Anyway, it doesn't seem to me that this thread serves any further productive purpose.