View source for RemyWiki:Public registration

Those familiar with RemyWiki and its 18+ year history will likely remember that we did, indeed, have open registrations at one point in the past. However, times have changed, and now RemyWiki opts to have a closed registration system, so as to protect the wiki as much as possible from vandalism and abuse.

= Why We Closed Registration =
There are two major reasons we have closed public registrations. 

== Spambots ==
Anyone who has ever moderated a website with user-submitted content (wiki, forum, blog, etc.) will know the pain of dealing with spambots. Spambots tend to register numerous accounts on wikis with open registration, and create or edit articles to link to their own websites, hoping to improve their standings in search engines by tricking algorithms such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank PageRank]. RemyWiki has been no different throughout the years, suffering from attacks from, at their peak in the 2000's, dozens of spambots ''per day''. The work to clean up this spam became untenable for wiki admins.

== Long-Term Abuse ==
The second, and arguably more important reason for closing registration, is to ensure that people that are banned from RemyWiki remain so. We have had a few instances of long-term abuse, where users would make malicious edits, requiring admins and other editors to clean up after them, wasting time that could be used to otherwise improve the wiki. These editors would register, make malicious edits, get banned, and then register another account. After one particular vandal's sockpuppet accounts were banned four times in three weeks, the decision to close public registration for good was made by admins.

= Discord =
Now, the primary way to get an account on RemyWiki is to join our [https://discord.gg/zsrTkXq Discord] and demonstrate that you are a trustworthy participant in the community. Once you have demonstrated that, you may request an account in the #new-people channel, and an admin will get back to you shortly.