ANN: Forums E-Mail Verification

We are constantly striving to make the user experience better here on the Handheld PC Community Forums, and in our latest effort to provide you with a better service and a SPAM free environment we have made the decision to write and install e-mail address verification on the member management system.

This verification is designed to ensure that forum members are who they say they are, while reducing the attack surface for automated spider attacks and significantly reducing the temptation for some of the more worrying manual SPAM attacks that we have seen on the forums in recent months.

The system is not designed to harvest information, neither is it going to be used as a part of any mailing list strategy - we simply want to clean up the community.

To this end, the new system has effectively disabled all user accounts in the server farm until you have validated your e-mail address with us. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by the introduction of this new facility.

Please be on the lookout for an email message with a subject line containing "HPC:Factor Handheld PC Community Forums: Verify your E-Mail" which ironically for many of you may inadvertently fall into your junk-mail folder.

In this e-mail there will be a custom unlock key for your account, which will re-activate your profile and allow you to log-in as normal.

For more information on the Validation system, for instructions on what to do if you do not receive the e-mail or if you know that you will not be able to receive the e-mail click the link below to access the site help & support.

Well done. Already waiting for unlock key

Quick Help Links

View: Full Help

View: I need to request the verification code again

View: I know that the e-mail address in my profile is invalid and need to change it to a working one

I can confirm that as of 0134 BST the server farm has finished sending all 7149 users the verification e-mail and subsequently barring log-in until you have verified.

If you have problems that the links above cannot fix, please e-mail the Webmaster!




As you might appreciate, I am getting a LOT of bounces on this - which was the point! I will try and skim through the list to search for any spam catchers etc, but it would be a great help if you could check your own junk-mail boxes. Thanks!


... if I never see another earthlink verifier it will be too soon

This is what the verification message looks like in case anyone is concerned:





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verif.JPG (115KB - 0 downloads)

Done and done. I was a little worried for a moment though.

Really, why was that?

I was just revelling with cmonex in the fact that after a smudge less than an hour 258 of you have verified; that's not bad!

Many of you proably haven't stopped by recently either, so welcome back!

How long a delay for a veification? I'm up to 3 tries with no luck.

Thanks, Don

FWIW, I just verified and it took maybe 5 mintues.

what do you mean by a "try"?

A new request for an email veification, entering email address twice.

Regards, Don

hmm, what kind of email addresses do you have...?

your spam filter seems to be too active

XXX@comcast.net

I see all of my junk every day, or at least everything that comcast passes on to me. ASFAIK, there is no user-configurable filter at comcast, so I have no indication that comcast is holding anything back.

Regards, Don

I have verified with comcast that I have no spam filter active and no screened messages trapped.

Regards, Don

Very strange then, I have been over the failure returns and there is NOTHING from comcast in it what so ever. I have sent a couple of manual mails to you Don, let us see if you receive those.

As of 10:36 BST this morning we have 683 failed returns, 728 forum members have successfully verified.

COPYCAT !!!

lol !!!


I see that your forum version is starting to look more and more like mine these days, Chris... Looks like your getting your ideas from a place that I know extremely well.



P.S. : instead of adding the "ANN:" (announcement) designation to the subject, why don't you sticky the thread ?
Then it would stay at the top where it belongs. Adding the "ANN:"-header won't do that, and I believe that this thread should be at the top of the forum, at least for a while. Technically, sticky threads are anouncement threads that require the attention of the forum users. That's what they're designed for. (hence the "Announcements"-header line and the separator that are added at the top when you have stickies in a forum)