Spammers

[al_infierno]

I saw a forum have a lot of trouble with spammers once. They came up with a pretty unique solution. Instead of IP banning or extra work in registering, they found what worked wasn't to try and play whack-a-mole (the bad ones will inevitably make a new account somehow).

Instead they had all new users start with a status where the first X posts had to be moderator approved individually before becoming visible to anyone else. If it wasn't mod approved in a certain time, it got deleted automatically.

Then if the spammers still got through that probation period, instead of being banned/deleted and encouraged to make a new account, the spammer would be limited to a 'special' forum that nobody aside from the admins saw, where the automated scripts would happily post their junk that didn't clutter up the rest of the forum.

This is a great idea.  I'll defer to JH's expertise of course.