How To Join Fotozones

[Dallas]

For now, I have turned off new registrations but I will be happy to do those manually if there are new members who would like to join this community. Even though it isn't all that active anymore there is a wealth of almost half a million posts about photography stored here that others may find very useful. 

 

If you are a real human and you would like to create an account on FZ please send an email to info@fotozones.com and give me a brief outline on why you would like to join. I will create your account manually and send you a verification from the backend where you can adjust your password, etc. 

 

To say that I am beyond disappointed with the tech industry at the moment would be fairly accurate. After more than 10 years of using the Invision software on two different urls with paid licenses I have now reached the point where I can no longer accept new registrations on this community unless I relent and pay the "developers" (more like demonic overlords) of Invision Community $200 to update the current versions with their fixes. The company behind Invision has made it very clear that they do not see any value in self-hosted license holders and are pretty much closing the door on those of us who use their software on our own servers. 

 

The main issue at the moment is that I am being inundated with spam registrations that somehow all seem to find a way around the reCaptcha verification, but never validate their email addresses. The Invision system is also not removing these bot registrations automatically the way it is supposed to which makes it very difficult and tedious to find real people in the approval queue.

 

My only option at the moment is to turn off registrations of new accounts until I can find the time and energy to migrate our community away from this Invision disaster to something that is friendlier to smaller communities. I am looking at Xenforo very closely and there is a migration path, but we will lose a fair amount of auxiliary data that doesn't form part of the forum side of Fotozones as a result. This will include the lens databases, my blog and a brand new learning section that I was planning on launching in the coming weeks. Ergo I need to formulate a plan to make this happen as painlessly as possible. 

 

Stay tuned.