Can't create Nim forum account. Never received any emails whatsoever, not even to spam. (Also, I have a bunch of typos to report.)

[WraithGlade]

Hello, I've been trying to create an official Nim forum account today since it is more active than Nim's subreddit, but despite waiting hours and making multiple attempts and password reset requests and variations of access/creation attempts and trying multiple different browsers (Firefox first, then Chrome later) the forum won't send me any emails no matter what I do. It is now repeatedly giving me an error message about "too many emails have been sent recently".

I've browsed the forum issues and it appears there are multiple instances of other people having this problem and it being impossible to create their accounts without asking for help from the maintainer of this repo by posting an issue about it here.

One thought that occurred to me as to why there may be an issue is the fact that my password for Nim's forum randomly contained multiple pieces of programming syntax. This makes me wonder if your home-made forum system has some kind of improperly thought out defective system for "protecting" itself from injection attacks by blocking any account whose username or password resembles programming syntax. A properly made password system should have zero dependencies on whether or not anything in a username or password looks like code, since there shouldn't even be a possibility of it running. For example, all usernames and passwords could be transformed into some other arbitrary textual form containing no possible code-like text before actually being used. Maybe the forum is thus falsely blacklisting people's accounts. That was my best random theory on something that could explain it. Just brainstorming.

Also, it seems unlikely that a home-made automatic emailing system is likely to remain functioning for long considering that emails services basically don't allow that and require some kind of accountability else they'll eventually start blocking all such traffic. At least, that's my understanding of it. My experience is overwhelmingly in offline standalone applications and not web stuff.

Anyway though, the most pressing reason why I wanted to make an account (besides long term use) was just that I wanted to send a list of minor typos I found in Andreas' newly released "Mastering Nim" book. Could you forward the list to him? I'm not sure what the preferred way of contact him for such things is since I didn't find any apparent contact info in the book and didn't find it on the main site either.

I'm really loving Nim so far and am excited to use it for my next project!

Here's the list of typos and formatting problems:

1. back cover: The last couple paragraphs of the back cover of the book are missing newlines, causing them to appear far too cramped hence hard to read and very sloppy/unprofessional looking. First impressions matter, so it's important to make the book cover look more professional if you want more people to buy it and to adopt the language. Don't underestimate the huge impact of seemingly "trivial" things like that!
2. page 23: "we could easily defined them ourselves" should be "we could easily define them ourselves"
3. page 57: "you are not supposed to learn the rules by hard" should be "you are not supposed to learn the rules by heart"
4. page 207 near bottom: proc =destroy[T](f: var Foo[T]) has incorrect syntax highlighting and a misplaced backtick
5. page 218 down 70%: "Let p the proc that is analyzed" should be "Let p be the proc that is analyzed"
6. page 223 near middle: "to rise the level of abstraction" should be "to raise the level of abstraction"
7. page 240 down 20%: "and contains the information if the parse was successful" should be "and is true if the parse was successful")

I hope that helps. I've been searching for a language that fits what I want for years and Nim is the closest yet. I really want to see it succeed, so I made extra effort when reading the book to find as many errors as I could.

I still really strongly suggest that you guys hire a professional book cover designer and have the cover of this book redone. Seemingly surface-level details like that often linger and make or break the public image of a product and can create domino effects of what impression it creates. Having a uniformly professional-looking front to all aspects of how you communicate Nim will help create a much better impression that will amplify how likely people are to consider it and to adopt it. It seems like a truly wonderful language!

Anyway though, have a great day/night/week/etc! I'm really impressed by what you guys have done with Nim and really looking forward to using it! It feels like the best new generation language overall so far. 🙂

[pietroppeter]

For the purpose of submitting typos for Mastering Nim's book, you can use https://github.com/Araq/mastering_nim/tree/master

Hope you also manage to get your forum user working

[WraithGlade]

Thanks for the info. I'll go repost the typos there too.

It does seem like the Nim forum system is having some problems for many people. For every 100 or 1000 users (or more) who encounter a problem in software only maybe ~1 of them will actually take the effort to report it (much like how for every huge number of YouTube video views only a tiny fraction like or comment on it), so this problem is also probably much larger and more frequent than it appears on the surface, as is typical for bugs. Hopefully they'll get it fixed soon. Intermittent random problems are always the hardest to debug though, unfortunately, so I can understand why it may be hard.

In the meantime at least there is still the subreddit forum for Nim.

[dom96]

https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/issues/214#issuecomment-1208616201