[Gwaihir]

New accounts are activated by a board administrator. Your account needs to be activated before you can post. If your account gets deleted instead of activated, you were taken for a spambot. Please see below how to avoid this and try again (unless you are indeed a spambot ). If activation takes too long, or you run into problems while signing up, please contact us at webmaster-atsign-meccg.net to work it out. (The current webmaster is Josh Hunholz. I, Wim, have retired a good while ago.)

Note that till it is activated an account does not show up in the users list or the newest user note at the bottom of the index page.

You do not need to fear spam coming from this registration:
-> There are no periodical mails tied to your membership.
-> Your e-mail address is accessible only to logged on moderators / administrators, unless you choose to make it public. Should there ever be any abuse by a member, do not hesitate to report it to one of the moderators or the webmaster. We consider it a most serious offence.

[Gwaihir]

The number of spambots / spammers attempting to sign up for these forums has increased massively over the last year. We've improved our defenses accordingly so we can manage without it taking too much of our time. However, the benefit of the doubt is pretty much gone by now; if your sign-up looks like a spammer's, you'll probably be out before you know what hit you.

Fortunately, it should be simple enough for any MeCCG-fan to avoid being taken for a spambot. Some tips:

• Fill out the real name field properly. We won't think of an actual person if he / it claims that SuperCoolDude2250 is really his / its name. Aside from a bot-catcher this is a courtesy towards fellow users and staff.
  
• Be careful what you put in the website field, as well as what hyperlinks you use in your signature. Till you've established yourself out here, it's best to avoid links altogether unless they lead to a page that is either clearly your personal homepage or clearly MeCCG or Tolkien related. Those whose first action here is to show a link to some commercial page or to a page that doesn't work by the time we visit it (usually already taken down after complaints), are generally not here for the MeCCG.
  
• Make sure you say something meaningful in your first couple of posts. You could for example introduce yourself in the introductions thread. What you want to avoid are one line posts like "Yeah, that's great" that could give us the impression you're just trying to show off your commercially oriented signature, or test a bot.
  
• Don't open multiple accounts. If you do run into any trouble activating your account, for example due to a typo in your e-mail address, please e-mail our webmaster (see opening post).

This is just a heads up; we haven't had any complaint yet, so probably we haven't deleted any legitimate sign up so far.