I can't post anything until I've activated anyway, and it didn't like something from the form several times, and each time I had to figure out a hard-for-humans image and type it in. If I get the image right the first time, STOP BOTHERING ME with it again and again and again until I found a username your system will accept and filled in everything right, or if I've gotten three in a row right, don't bother with the email activation. You practically need a HOWTO for registering. It should take seconds but takes minutes. Spam is a problem, but making it painful for every user with a paranoia level of protection makes the cure worse than the disease.
I can understand your annoyance, but without the protection we'd get several hundred spam posts per day... We'd then have to clean the forum the whole day, leaving us no time for doing other things. The alternative would be to close the forum - but that's not an option!
I did not say you should use no protection. I just said you are doing too many levels which are probably not helping with spam but causing me problems. And remastersys TWICE caused major problems with my system (Ubuntu) because it changes BUT DOES NOT CORRECTLY RESTORE the uid. I still haven't fully recovered, and I think you should note this somewhere before other users ruin their systems with the program. I know how to recover. All I wanted to do was warn other users they might totally trash their systems with this utility. It is going to take longer to write a "howto recover your system after remastersys changes all your uids" if you bother. My complaint about the too many layers is on the main screen: First I have to get that number graphic right. If I happen to get something wrong on the initial form OTHER than the number graphic, I have to retype it and I GET A NEW GRAPHIC. If I get the graphic right, why do I have to do three times (oops, we don't like your name, oops, we erased your password, oops, something else was wrong, oops, I forgot you changed the image). A spambot will get the image right the first time if it is using good software, and it will do so much faster than I can. Or it won't be able to at all. And it will fill in all fields right. I have to get the image right several times. Is that really necessary? I don't have to decode a graphic when posting, Or when verifying the email address (you could move it there so I would have gotten the registration form right) so why should I have to do it multiple times when attempting to register?
It's noted that there's no waranty for published tutorials. The author somehow managed to get things working but You or anyone else doesn't have to. When trying to do something You take full responsibility for Your system. I've made two great images of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 prepared just the way I need and like using Remastersys and I'm very happy I could find such usefull tutorials here.
Dangerous I know most of this is without warranty, but I thought other users might like a warning or two or a note on how to prevent problems or make recovery easier. Also it isn't clear that remastersys is a dangerous program that alters fundamental system information. It is being touted as something that simply acts like another backup, something like tar but with the ability to create live CDs. There is a difference between partition resizers, formatters, defraggers, or other programs that there is a high risk of rendering the system inoperative or destroying data, and programs that might zap one or two files. It is somewhat more risky than a dist-upgrade and something should be there to note that instead of the blanket "no guarantee". remastersys is in the "high potential for damage category" when it fails, and it can fail simply because there is not enough free space on /home for the entire image and auxiliary files, and it does not contain any instructions about how to recover from a failure - what not to delete, or how to manually reconstruct the damaged UIDs.
