Force guests to give a name + e-mailaddress

[Teslasparker]

(might be this belongs more in requests, if so, sorry. I tried to find anything about it, didn't come up with what I searched for, so here goes)

We're wondering whether it's possible to force guests that are posting on our forums, to give a nickname instead of teh standard "unregisterd" when they forget to fill in a nick.

Also we wonder if it is possible to force them to fill in an e-mailaddress when posting as a guest.

Reason being that at the moment we're being spammed by some guys who enjoy offending others and IP's are dynamically and of a schoolproxy, so banning means banning a lot of users. Moderating guestposts is really a lot of work (and very slow for the guests, as they have to wait until some admin or mod approves their post), so no option either for the longterm. Disallowing guests posting is no option either, since the subject of the forum is a bit troublesome for most, so registering is really a large step for most of the visitors and we want to keep the threshold as low as possible.


Hopefully you have any idea's? Thanks in advance.

[Floris]

Why not have guests register before they post?
That way you can validate they are not spamming, etc.

[Teslasparker]

Why not have guests register before they post?
That way you can validate they are not spamming, etc.

Because, as I stated, registering is a large threshold for most of them. So that is really a last possibility option. We would more like to have the option that they are force to fill in a nick and an e-mailaddress as this was also what the community was used to with the former forumsoftware. Moreover: a lot of people forget to fill in a nick, so there are a lot of posts by user "unregistered" even in one topic and then readers and posters get confused on whether the topicstarter replies as "unregistered" or whether it's someone else.

Edit: the other problem is that users usually log themselves out, especially at public computers in order to keep others from knowing what they're thinking. Result: people forget to login and post as guest, leaving confusion and extra work for moderators in order to fix things. That problem would also be fixed when users are once again forced to give in a nickname (the are reminded then that they're not logged in).

[cka]

With some javascript you can modify the newthread/newreply templates to not allow 'Guest' people to post threads/replies. I have no particular idea about the code behind it, however, but you can surely find many examples on the internet.

[Steve Machol]

Doing this requires modifying the code which we cannot support. Try asking over at vbulletin.org.

[Teslasparker]

Doing this requires modifying the code which we cannot support. Try asking over at vbulletin.org.

Allright, thanks.