Registration difficulties

[Pelli]

I had troubles with two things when I tried to register in this forum:
1) coming up with a password containing mixed case and digits that I would not forget immediately.
2) solving the captcha, I think I needed 5 tries. (At least I didn't have to re-type my password each time, like they make you do on some other sites)

I suggest you remove the password security requirements because account security is not crucial for this site (and what's the point with having a secure password to this site when your e-mail password is not?), and that you use reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/) instead, which many people are familiar with, gives the user some slack, and has not been hacked AFAIK. Otherwise you might lose potential members (I tried to join 3 months ago, but gave up because I didn't have a secure password. If there were no restrictions, I would have used my lowest-security password, and I believe that decision should have been mine to take.).

Also, I think you should only have one level of forums (i.e. merge The Knowledge Bank into the Public Area), with the forums listed in decreasing order of interest for the general public:
Questions (The Study Hall)
Debates (The Reactor Core)
Publications (The Peer Review, Powerful News)
Other (The Deep Repository, The Workshop, Requests, Feedback & Questions)

Perhaps some forums should be merged too, as e.g. questions easily turn into debates.

[Michael]

I hear you Pelli. We've been having waves of spam bots come in here... some get through and we've had some very nasty posts made. I've been looking at phpBB's website for anti-spam features but they are few and far between. I'll certainly take a look at reCAPTCHA. I'm even pondering doing my own php hack for this.

Password security has been cranked down now.

As far as forum structure goes, I'll take a peek at it during vacation... mine is coming up soon.

Thanks for the feedback.

/Michael