Die, spammers, die!

One of the policies we have for all of our Puzzle Baron sites is that registration does not require an email address… we recommend you do provide one, so that you can use all functionality on the site, get password reminders, email notifications, etc., but we also understand that a large number of people don’t want to give out their email address just to play a game.  This policy has worked great for more than two years – but now we’re getting absolutely inundated with spammers.

For now, the policy will remain – email addresses are still optional – but we are clamping down a bit on what new registrations are allowed to do on the site.  For 99.9% of people, this will cause no problems whatsoever – you can still play games, accrue statistics, etc. as normal – but you may not be able to post to the forums, customize your profile, contact other players, etc. until you’ve spent a certain amount of time on the site, played a certain number of games, etc.  This way we’ll know for sure that you’re actually playing the games and that you’re interested in using the site for something other than spamming links and inappropriate content in our forums.

So far this has been rolled out on:

1. www.Cryptograms.org
2. www.WordTwist.org
3. www.DropQuotes.com
4. www.Sudokus.tv
5. www.Acrostics.org
6. www.Logic-Puzzles.org

And we’ll continue to roll this out to all our remaining sites.  If this solution works, then great – if not, we may need to eventually review our email/registration requirements.  My hope, though, is that we won’t need to go that far.

Thanks for playing, as always!

- Stephen