I’ve had a few requests for this, the most recent coming from Zygon Dragon.

While I’ve been loathe (in the past) to allow user registrations at Aiera owing to the simply insane amount of spam (and spambots, natch) that the site tends to attract, I stumbled across a plugin that I think has allowed me to sufficiently harden the registration process.

So I’m willing to give it a try, at least.

What are the advantages of registration? Well, if at some later point you’d like to be a content contributor for Aiera, it would be trivial indeed for me to elevate your user privileges a point at which you could submit articles. On a more practical level, it eliminates the need to populate the name/email/web address fields in the comments form whenever you want to contribute to a discussion.

Additionally, with a registered user account, you will be able to add the site to the WordPress app for Android, Apple’s iOS, or BlackBerry, so you can check comments on your mobile.

What are the disadvantages of registration? Because I’m using email confirmation as a spam prevention measure, you have to tell me your real email address. Then again, most of you have already been doing that when you leave comments, and I’ve been respecting the secrecy of that data…so hopefully, this won’t be a point against.

Anyhow, you can register as a site user by either clicking the button in the top-right area of the page (right below the ad banner), or you can click here.

And just for the record, the following people already have user accounts at the site, in most cases courtesy of an earlier experiment I did with a different forum technology:

• Armchair Avatar
• Dave “Bob1234” Gunn
• Dino the Dark Dragon
• Dominus
• Enderandrew
• Matthew “Eternic” Carr
• Hawkwind
• HexxxerRP
• Kalrithian
• Natreg Dragon
• Joe “Origin Museum” Garrity
• Petrell
• Quietus Dragon
• Revan
• Saxon1974
• Mark “Swotavator” Mitchell
• Toltec Dragon
• Nicodemus
• Wizardry Dragon
• Tim “Zen” Nolan

So if you are on that list, good Dragons and Dragonettes, please don’t re-register; just drop me a line if you’ve forgotten your user credentials.

Sadly, users from the current forum are not currently integrated with the main site, but that may change in short order; I have some investigation to do. So if you’re already registered at the forum, you might want to hold off on registering for Aiera proper, at least until I’ve had some time to tinker. Check back at this post later in the day for a message concerning my success or failure in this regard.

If, on the other hand, you haven’t registered for any part of Aiera…feel thou free to do so now, if thou wishest.

Update: It would appear that the integration plugin I was looking at has not yet been updated for WordPress 3.x; it may also be incompatible with one of the plugins I’m using on the site. So for now, logins will have to remain separate…but I will work to get this smoothed over as quickly as I can.

Updatier: As I expected, I’m still getting a fair number of spam registrations. The verification process is keeping the bots from actually gaining user accounts to the site, but I’ll probably have to institute a nightly purge of all unverified accounts in order to stay on top of things.

The registration security plugin I installed also gives me the option of setting up a “by invitation” registration system, which I may investigate further.

Updatiest: Okay, the spam is getting pretty stupid. I’ve implemented the “by invitation” registration system; if you would like to register for the site, leave a comment with your real email address and I will mail you the code. (I’m thinking that the codes will shift on a roughly month-to-month basis.)