I can understand no gmail for sign up, but why afterwards

[James5mith]

Gmail is my primary email.

I have that, and I have my work email. I would like to think that I will continue to use Zabbix both at work and home long after I have moved on from my current job. But as it stands now, there is no way for me to use my primary email on the forums. I can understand not allowing sign up with a given "spam" email domain, but why can't I change it after the fact?

Almost every person I know uses gmail as their primary non-work email address.

So why am I not allowed to use my primary email address here, even after registering?

[tchjts1]

Because if an e-mail domain is on our blocked e-mail list, it simply cannot be used, neither pre nor post registration. That is a limitation of the forum software we use.

The reason it is on our blocked list is that when we had gmail as an option for registration, we were getting bombarded with 50+ spam accounts per day. These were being automatically created by spambots and all of them were using gmail addresses. We had no choice.

I have spent months cleaning up the spam accounts from this forum to the tune of about 80,000 spam accounts. We are not going through that again.

[James5mith]

The other thing that I noticed is that since signing up here, I have been bombarded with spam on my work email.

[tchjts1]

I would question if it is coming from here. I have never received a spam message from being on this forum in 5 years, even when my contact info was visible to everyone. If you do think it is from here, simply go to the "UserCP" link at the top left of the page and change your profile privacy for who can see your contact info.

[dmittner]

We had no choice.

Sorry, but that's bull.

Just improve your CAPTCHA to prevent automated signups. Or tweak the confirmation process to require a third step that bots aren't ready for.

Yours is far from the only forum on the internet but yours is the first I've ever seen ban @gmail in its entirety.

As to James5mith's suggestion, that's completely possible. This forum software is just PHP. If you guys have the capacity to write Zabbix, you certainly have the capacity to tweak PHP to omit the domain restriction when someone edits their profiles.