smitbar wrote:Could you not set up a>>"membership requires approval by a moderator / admin"<< like some other forums have? You can then vet prospective members before they get an activation link.
That really sorts out the undesirables. I joined here very easily, with only a '1st post requires approval'..
We could, but that would be a lot more time consuming (and it's already a lot to do just approving first posts).
For every spammer that tries to post, there are 20 that try to register. It's a lot easier for the admin team to stop the posts becoming public, than to try to vet prospective members as part of the registration process.
As it is registration is a 2 step process, requiring verification through a valid email address, which weeds out quite a lot as well. There are always quite a lot of inactive members, i.e. tried to register but not yet clicked on the activation email.
There are a host of other options, for example suspending viewable member profiles and inclusion in memberlist until first post approval, but again these are modifications which would be a) time consuming to implement and b) would require testing / updating every time the forum software was updated.