[Official] Email issue fixed + unconfirmed accounts purged

[SkullTraill]

In recent times, as WF has been growing, we had begun to face some issues with email sending. WF is hosted on a special type of server in a region of the world where we do not have to worry about copyright issues. These types of servers are often associated with piracy websites, and other types of what many consider to be "nefarious" websites. In an effort to eliminate some of the negative repercussions of being labeled as a "spam" or "warez" server farm, our hosting provider takes certain measures to ensure it's (and by extension WF's) servers remain in good standing and unblacklisted.

One of the restrictions we face is the amount of outgoing emails we are allowed to send per day. When I first moved WF to this type of hardened hosting provider, we were under those email limits. But WF now had 1000s of active members, many who receive email notifications for threads they have interacted with, and weekly summary emails etc. As such, without my knowledge, we had exceeded the daily email quota frequently.

This meant that many people were not receiving email notifications and weekly summaries, but even worse - many new registrations were not receiving their account confirmation emails. Recently when investigating an email deliverability issue reported by @Yazata, I noticed there were once again 1000s of accounts with unconfirmed emails. No doubt caused by exceeding the daily outbound email quota.

In some cases, members who tried to report this using the contact form (which sends me an email) had those requests fail multiple times on multiple days, meaning I wasn't even aware of it.

WF has now moved to an external, extremely reliable email service, with pay-as-you-go pricing, meaning there is almost no quota anymore. So now the email sending issue is completely resolved, but still leaves the issue of the accounts over the last month or 2 that were not able to confirm their emails. It is too much of a hassle to contact each account with a message to request a new confirmation email, and it doesn't make sense to bulk send new confirmation emails either considering not all of those accounts were effected by this (some users just give up at the email confirmation stage).

Therefore, I have purged (deleted) all accounts with unconfirmed emails. I repeat, all accounts with unconfirmed emails are deleted! If you were unable to confirm your account over the past few months, your account has been deleted. Please register again, and confirm your account via the confirmation email. The Contact Form should also be working more reliably now.

I apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused, and please let me know if you are still having issues with receiving emails. If for some reason, you are still not able to use the contact form, you can email me. The email address is admin @ this website.

 

[Aeternus]

I salute this decision.

People need to understand servers, just like computers, have finite storage, although on a wider scale. Accounts that were unconfirmed based on email exceeded the allowed network memory (the email sending quota) and possibly caused some server memory issues in my opinion as well.

Imagine having an account that is unconfirmed yet the user database tabel grew in size based even on a single entry. Thousands is already worse in my opinion...

I hope this will make people learn that you need e-mail confirmation in order to access WF.. and even more important:

Just like on any other website that legitimately asks you to do so, so does WF ask you to provide email validation / confirmation to prove account legitimacy and prevent bot flooding.

Edit:

Funny enough how the user count is much smaller despite it being 4:03 P.M. EEST in my country timezone:

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[Morell]

Good that it got found and resolved. Receiving multiple mails daily myself, so no doubt that 1000 mails a day were exceeded quite easily.

 

[SkullTraill]

@Aeternus yes, I agree, but kind of the point of this thread is that in many cases the users were not able to confirm their accounts through no fault of their own (my fault, emails were not sending). Around 50% of unconfirmed accounts at the time of the purge, I suspect.

In any case, shouldn't be as big of an issue going forward.