Top 10 Greatest Moments of 2008 in theO

9 - E-Mail Confirmation For New Accounts:

Just as it’s no fun to be king of a fake nation, it’s no fun to be in a rankings system with artificially inflated statistics. It remains a source of great sadness to know that we found out two of the site’s most subscribed members high in the ranks because of fake accounts created for the sole purpose of adding subscription numbers to said-members. It takes advantage of the honour system much of this site runs on, and no one likes that.

Likewise, it’s no fun when you have the same twelve year old kid getting banned for both being too young for this 13+ website and for harassing members – after every new ban, there would be a brand new account name to pick up right where the last one ended.

Now, we’ve a little bit less of that to worry about with one simple addition to the registration process: e-mail confirmation.

Essentially, when you register, you need to reply back to an e-mail message to finalize your account registration. In doing so, you need a legitimate, working e-mail address. If a second account on the same e-mail address pops up, that’s far easier to track now.

It’s certainly far from foolproof, but it puts just a few more hurdles in the way of an otherwise annoying little problem that tends to get way out of hand quicker than not.

This was a new feature, though. In the meantime, there were other features – old features – that had yet to return. That stopgap is where our next subject on the list comes in…