Quote Originally Posted by vinkat View Post
Hello, I've been reading this forum from time to time and thought could also participate. On that note, the fact that you need to post in this thread before you can participate in other discussions is a bit discouraging... forum owner doesn't know how to fight spam?
The sign-up process can take as little as 10 minutes depending on the time of day and who's on-line... is that really discouraging?

If you can tell me (the current owner and manager of the community) how to fight spam completely automatically with the same success rate as we have with this slightly manual process, then I'll happily listen (I suspect in truth you can't). But the fact of the matter is that the boards are now fighting a lot more spam automatically than they ever have before. Since the site came back on-line over 40,000 spam accounts have been automatically blocked. But some are still getting through... if we put you straight into the normal user group think how many messages you could post automagically? Think how long one of the staff would have to spend cleaning up... I don't want to be doing that and I don't want the staff to have to waste their time doing it either.

This is a slightly manual process, but thus far it's proving quite reliable in terms of keeping spam out of the rest of the forums.

So I'm sorry that some people find it slightly annoying but I would rather have this than having the forums littered with junk!