Improving the permies.com sign-up process

I personally was completely caught off guard by the naming policies, and had to wait a few days for an acceptable name to be approved before I could post (consideringhow busy the mods must be i dont blame you. Its just a but inefficient) . I don't know if it's there and I just missed it, but a noticeable note about no obviously fictional names right next to the name box when you sign up would be nice. Also, this is a bit beyond my abilities, but perhaps some sort of program that automatically flags obvious names and rejects it during sign up, that way anyone (like me) who didnt notice the requirements would be more likely to be stopped and fix it immediately themselves during the sign up process. It would save staff time in sorting through names too. Just having the computer flag commonly used words or phrases would probably cut down on much. For instance animal names or agriculture words?  Real or fictional. I imagine just that would stop a huge portion of mistakes. (Ex I tried to use "Gardenfairy")

All that the forum asks is that you use a real sounding name.

Paul said, "If you use a name that is not your real name, but sounds like a real name, that is great. I have only one requirement in that space: never publicly announce that your name is fake.

As for "why": because I wanna. Why does an painter use blue instead of teal? Why does a sculptor use clay instead of granite? It has been my experience for over 25 years of running on-line forums that this is the path I want to follow.

https://permies.com/t/12298/permies-real-sounding-policy

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to complain about the policy, i can think of several reasons for it to be in place, even if it did catch me off guard! I was trying to suggest a way to make it better seen at sign up and less moderator intense. I'm sure it frustrates the mods to have to constantly flag new sign ups and block the account then wait for an appropriate name to approve. I'm sure a few new sign ups get frustrated and decide not to come back (although i suppose the type of person to do that not coming back might be a bonus actually..) so I was trying to come up with a way to help streamline the process.

I just tested

It appears the name policy is still easily visible.

Looks like about one third of the text on the sign up page is dedicated to it.

Funny thing is, when it's in larger letters, fewer people seem able to find it.  The internet has trained us to ignore large letters or all caps as it's usually trying to sell us something.   Right now, it's about one in 200 who miss it or who see it but don't care enough about the community to feel it applies to them.

r ransom wrote:I just tested

It appears the name policy is still easily visible.

Looks like about one third of the text on the sign up page is dedicated to it.

Funny thing is, when it's in larger letters, fewer people seem able to find it.  The internet has trained us to ignore large letters or all caps as it's usually trying to sell us something.   Right now, it's about one in 200 who miss it or who see it but don't care enough about the community to feel it applies to them.

I wasn't sure if it was there or not (yes I totally missed it) and your explanation about large or caps definitely sounds true, I could see where you were going with that halfway through the first sentence!
 Having a program that auto-rejects comon fake names/names including obviously fake words might still help though, maybe? Like when you go to make a new email and it says "that name is taken", but "that name is obviously fictional" instead? I really don't know programming or how difficult that would be, but I could help come up with a list of words to trigger it! As a bonus, getting this message would help those who just completely missed the requirement. (in my case I was half asleep at 2 am with a sick toddler trying to learn about permaculture while I was forced to be awake anyway.. yes I missed it.)

On the other hand, it sounds like I was already in the minority and maybe it isn't as big a nuisance to the mods as I expected, so maybe it really isn't necessary. Sorry for putting my nose where it didn't belong!

We found it's much better to use a real human metric for assessing names.  There is about 36 different reasons, many of them aren't shared publicly.

However, some of the more common ones is that a real human can see more easily joke names.  

We also have people from all over the world volunteering, so we will often have a conversation first to see if the name is a regional one.

But also, we have people like me where my name is fairly common locally, but not internationally.  Things go smoother if I use my initial.