What's the deal with this site?

I've visited it a few times in the past and decided to try to create an account so that I could post if I wanted to.

Submitted my information to register and got an email today, which was about a month since I registered, that said "Unfortunately your registration at NeoGAF did not meet our membership requirements. Therefore your registration was deleted."


Ummm.. the basic info they collect on the registration screen basically asks for your username, password, email address, timezone, and XBox gamertag. What about that didn't meet their membership requirements?

:headshake:

You have to have a non-free email account (like a work, school or other email) and have to hate Microsoft REALLY REALLY hard. Then a year later they'll approve your account.

I have my own domain for email... so I didn't use a yahoo or gmail account. Maybe I shouldn't have put in my XBox gamer tag? Or put in M$ $ucks! ?

Maybe they search and make sure you have a history of posting stupid gifs at other forums?

Hmmm.. in that I think I am lacking.. I don't go around posting stupid gifs or bash any certain console.. honestly, they should put that as requirements on the registration page so I'd know.

The responses thus far say more about this forum than they do about NeoGAF IMO.

GAF is a diverse forum where tons of industry guys participate, including guys from MS. I know at a minimum that Major Nelson, Albert Penello and Chris Charla post there occasionally, and I actually had a friendly PM discussion with Chris Charla a few months back. There's a reason so much gaming news starts as "leaks on GAF".

They are also much less tolerant of intellectually dishonest posting than most other forums, or at least that's been my observation watching fanboys of all varieties get banned. Whatever perceived "Sony-bias" GAF currently has is a direct reflection of the relative appeal of the three consoles on the market and is the same bias consumers worldwide have shown in hardware sales to date. They were no doubt "MS-biased" in the same way in 2007-2008.

On the downside, they do tend to get up their own asses from time to time, and they sometimes overreact to seemingly trivial news, but that comes with the territory of talking with people who are passionate about anything.

As to the original question, it was most likely your email address. They mandate "real" email addresses to minimize spammers, duplicate accounts, shills, etc.

Thank you for the post. My replies here have been in a joking manner.. not sure of the others.. but I assume that perhaps they are.

I planned on lurking there a bit reading stuff, once I have the ability to log in, to get a feel for the place. I do like that there is often industry people posting there.

I suspect that the issue may be with the email address. It is a real email address that I used, as I have my own domain for email.. Perhaps they didn't like the front portion? I just tried again using a different email address available on my domain. I got the verification email rather quickly.. just now waiting in the moderation queue again.

And another Registration deleted message.

Seriously?

It almost has to be the domain on your email, and it's almost certainly automated. What's the domain, if you don't mind sharing it?

It's probably just as well to lurk there anyway. The hot threads move faster than you can read them and usually result in a few people getting banned, including one of the people above, but the forum overall is very informative and will generally keep you at least a day or two ahead of the gaming news cycle.

I use GAF mostly like I used to use the gaming blogs, for information, but I don't post there more than a few times a week.

I applied there with two addresses way back in the day. I'm pretty sure the one from my isp is the one that made it through, and the one from my own domain never got approved.

I hardly ever post there anymore. As chess said, the threads tend to move way too fast for anyone to really hold a real conversation. Some of the community threads are nice though. I mainly use my account for subscriptions now. It's way easier to keep track of some key threads that way than to wade through pages and pages of stuff as the stuff I'm interested in drops back.

Also, I've met quite a few lifelong friends that from the Rock Band community (which had a hilarious downfall quite a few years back) (not the game, but the actual community on GAF). There's good people on there, but there are more than a few trolls and console warriors you'll have to learn to ignore.

Absolutely true. The "news" threads move so fast your input hardly matters unless you're being purposefully controversial.

But the OT threads for specific games are awesome. The GAF Warframe clan on PS4, as an example, is super active, and they also regularly go back and play/discuss older games.

I meant to add above that it's also a more international forum than most others, so you get a much different perspective than you do if you're only watching NA.

Yes, this forum can take a joke.

Agreed, I like reading some technical threads on there on occasion and there's some smart people on there with good analysis. But there's lots of blatent trolls and console bashing and I wish they were far stricter on it; this forum does a far better job with that.

Their registration process is completely haphazard. My first account took 364 days to be approved.

Well, most of it.

Trying once more using my actual ISP email address. I didn't want to use that one, but it should hopefully let them authorize the account. That or I'll find myself banned because I tried to register a username 3 times. and all 3 were rejected.

These two comments and the inconsistency between them tell you everything you need to know about why this forum is and always will be a ghost town...sadly.

And this brilliant insight always follows.

It will likely work this time, but like I said, being able to post there is actually of marginal utility because the traffic moves so fast.

It's not inconsistent at all, there's jokes and there's straight up console bashing and it was pretty clear who was guilty of which. The moderators have done a good job seeing that.

And it's obvious how this thread is going to devolve the way you keep steering it that way, which seems completely unnecessary.

if it is such a ghost town, chess, why don't you leave? i'm not going to derail this thread, but you constantly complain about this place. just leave and do yourself a favor.

I love DVDtalk, that is why i have been here since 1999. 90% of the members are mature decent human beings.

Yeah!

And if you don't like it, you can go to Blu-ray.com or Home Theater Forum!

This forum is a ghost town because the name on the website is about a basically dead media format. I stick around because I like the people here, and since the upheaval, I also like the moderation again.

The reason this forum can deal with trolls better is because there's not that much to read. This forum is dying, but I haven't found a good replacement, and no one mention reddit to me.

can someone explain to me in 1 sentence, what the fuck is reddit?