Forum registration and posting

[pixelgeek]

Hi folks

Just registered for the forum and while I can appreciate that you want to keep spammers out of the system, it seems to me that you are making it obnoxiously difficult to sign up instead of making it easier for admins to catch spammers and keep them out.

SMF has a very handy extension that allows you to check new users against the Stop Forum Spam database to flag new registrations by email, IP and username. Add this extension and then require all new registrations to be approved by an admin and that should stop spammers dead in their tracks.

I have used it on several boards and it allowed me to remove the multiple registration questions (I just keep one because spambots automatically fill them making it easier to identify them) and CAPTCHAs

[worktroll]

Pixelgeek,

We're currently using the Stop Forum Spam extension. However, given we're a volunteer organisation, it's more efficient for us to use that in combination with a Captcha, than to require all new registrations to be vetted by an Admin.

The Captcha disappears after you make 10 posts. We dont' consider that a difficulty in terms of registration of new members. Yes, it's annoying for the first 10 posts, but this has proven to be a good balance between ease & effectiveness on many forums, not just here.

I hope you'll bear with this for the remaining posts needed to clear the Captcha.

Cheers,

Worktroll, Admistrator.

[Paul]

Back under my inept regime (I lack the skillz), all we had was SFS. It meant I had to spend time every day to clear out 200-500 spam accounts. If you're curious what that amounted to, just check out your account's user#, and compare it to the actual number of accounts; long story short, there were millions, and literally hundreds of thousands managed to make accounts I had to remove anyway.
Mind you, that was superior to our experience without SFS. Particularly the SR forums had it bad for a while.

Then someone who actually knows what they're doing took over, and the problem died.