User registration issue with HTLAL

[Hypatia]

Hello there,

I have been lurking semi-regularly on HTLAL for the last year or so as my German ability painstakingly inches towards the B1 mark. I've found some really useful material on there and am very grateful to all you learned posters.

However - I have twice tried to register so that I can post myself, with absolutely no success. The first time I think I didn't fill in enough of the background detail boxes to satisfy the manual approval process, and the second time my registration seemed to go through OK but I never received a confirmation email.

I mention this because I've seen a reference on the main HTLAL site about declining number of new users, and I can't help but wondering how many people have had the same experience as me when trying to sign up, and just given up and walked away....?

(Registering on this temporary site was blissfully quick and easy - many thanks! If the focus shifts back to the main site I'd be really grateful for any help to allow me to register on there.)

[Meramarina]

Thanks for letting us know about this, and welcome! I am sorry that the registration process is difficult and ineffective. I'm not exactly sure what is wrong. I think the software is malfunctioning badly because I've noticed some inconsistencies in account activations. Now that we have this forum space, I hope more people have less trouble. As usual, we are trying to reach the HTLAL administrator. There is a spam filter set up which automatically deletes spam emails, and it's possible that it is deleting legitimate accounts in error. I'm not sure.

I remember that when I registered way back in 2008, it took three days of figuring out how to register and participate and it was very annoying. By then I had just about changed my mind about wanting to post n the forum. It's not a new problem but it seems to be worse now.

[CarlyD]

I was under the impression that the main HTLAL registration problems were well known. I originally registered sometime in 2012, waited, was denied as a spammer, registered again under a different email address, waited and never heard anything. In 2013 I was reading posts and decided to try to log on, and found I was registered.

So it only took about a year.

For the old site to survive, they have to keep getting new members. Expecting someone to hang out for months hoping to be approved is crazy.

[Meramarina]

Oh, that's even worse than I thought Sorry about that. If we ever get through to the administrator and he's willing to look into it, we'll let him know. There was a major spam attack in 2011 and a lot of repair work was done, but I think something has gone wrong and legitimate accounts aren't getting through. We have to verify them one at a time now as the come in and sort out the spam accounts, but I still activate new accounts every day, and I have been wonder where they all go! It looks like a lot of members aren't getting the activation email.

[Kazumi]

I totally understand what CarlyD and Hypatia have said.

I thought very few people have had problems to register in the HTLAL. I have been a lurker over the years due to the problems I have had there.

First, in 2006 I registered there, but unfortunately my account got deactivated in less than 8 months. I didn’t receive any notification to my e-mail telling me that they would deactivate it and I have no idea why I lost my previous username.

I have tried 8 times (one by year under different e-mails) just to re-join the HTLAL which I successfully did by last year. During over 8 years I couldn’t register because I was accused for being a spammer each time, even though I have filled in all the blankets in all those 8 times as they have asked me to.

Last year I thought that it would be my last attempt to register there. One day while navigating I had the idea to use the username and password. Although I was already expecting to hear that my account has not been activated, fortunately I was wrong! I got registered there after 8 years! I have checked my e-mail’s inbox, spam folder etc and I haven’t seen any confirmation e-mail. I really hope this time I will not get deactivated again since I have waited for such a long period. This sounds like a joke. It was really annoying. Really. Hopefully no more members have been through this.

[Meramarina]

Thanks for the feedback! We are learning a lot from this. It shouldn't be so hard to join. It looks like we haven't heard how bad it is because the technical problems prevent people from reporting technical problems. No wonder participation is way down

There's a known bug in the software which deactivates an account if a user changes email address. We can fix that one, but it sounds like the problems are more extensive that that.

Thanks for your patience and persistence. I don't know if we'll ever get through to the administrator in a way that changes things. But we are trying. In the meantime, we have this space.

[kimchizzle]

Well I had the opposite experience as other people. I had come back to HTLAL after a year or two away 1 month ago and realized I had forgotten my old username and password. I just decided to make a new account, and I typed everything in and got a email that I couldn't post anything until my account was verified that I wasn't a spammer. I went to sleep for the night and when I woke up in the morning, my account was verified and I was able to post with the new username. Funnily enough, I remembered the old username a few days after I created the new account.

All in all

[Wanderer81]

First Post here.

Same experience as Nieng Zhonghan. Over 5 years as a regular lurker on HTLAL and never could register after trying many many times. This is so much better and easier to access. Thank you to everyone who worked on setting this up.

[lone wolf]

No idea whether this is generally known -- the post linked below is from April 2012, that is one year after I left the forum -- Steve Kaufmann didn't make it through the sign-up process, either:

https://www.lingq.com/forum/1/14646/?page=1

[rlnv]

I failed my first attempt also. At the time I figured my profile was not sufficiently creative or that I was not advanced enough, having only started my first L2 at the time. A month later I made it though and was rather surprised. I went on to pay for a year membership having been so grateful for the vast amount of knowledge I gained from the forum about how to learn a language. I didn't know at the time the owner was absent. It strikes me as such a waste of what could have been an even greater forum had the owner continued to take an interest.