@thecravenone haha yeah, really perfect validation is sort of a gordian knot. Kind of like Datetimes and Telephone numbers where the full set of rules is vastly more complicated than people assume. Luckily the problem TMD would have to solve is much easier than that. In theory I don't really care whether someone is able to type in a valid email or not, I care that people are only using email addresses that they have access to. I don't need any clientside validation to confirm that, I need to send an email to that address and it's up to the user to confirm receipt. There's still a few issues there though:
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the emailer on the site is broken. As in, the server software that runs TMD is supposed to send out emails and it just doesn't. I don't know why. It could end up being a very simple server-configuration problem, or it could be bugs deep in code I've never seen, it requires investigation
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confirming emails doesn't do anything to stop bots with access to email addresses, and I suspect most of them do. Email verification is probably more of a hassle to humans than it is to bots.
Honestly out of principle I'd rather not collect any information I don't actually use or need, and since right now TMD doesn't send emails, I don't have any reason to collect or require email addresses. As a webdev, every site I've professionally worked for collects a bunch of data they don't use, and passes that data onto Google and Facebook for free (I think often without realizing or caring that they're doing it). It annoys me when other sites do it so I'd rather not do it myself.
Of course that's no reason for me not to fix the emailer, if people WANT to get notifications or account recovery emails I should give them that option, but not require it.
I think this is all separate from the spambot issue which is probably best solved by some MTG-Related Captcha (like "name this mox") on login. This is still not something I have as a priority to implement but enough people keep talking about it I'll probably feel guilty and build it 
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