christel wrote:As much as I have been putting it off and hate to do it because I do not think it is in the spirit of the forum I have now decided to accept new members by approval only.
Unfortunately dealing with this sort of thing is a fact of Internet life.
The signup process presumably deals with bots effectively via a captcha, but there are still teams of low paid workers who will manually sign up to forums in order to farm links (presumably in the hope that they are poorly moderated so that their links will remain long enough to be spidered by search engines). Moderated signup *may* not deter them. In that case, moderated signup might just be making more work, since they can still post the link spam (which requires cleaning-up) and you've also had to interact in the signup process (unless you can reliably spot spammers to reject signups, and the resulting reduction in spam more than offsets the extra work of moderating signups).
I guess only time will tell whether moderated signup will actually pay off by saving more work than it creates, and doesn't deter people from signing-up or lead to false positives.
The main thing is: don't let them p*** you off!
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