Which Member Approval Method?

[Kit Singleton]

[KansasDragon]

Kit, I don't run a forum, but I'm curious. If you do admin approval, what happens when you're gone on vacation, or to a seminar, etc?

The forums I frequent most commonly have very active admin/owners, who are on the run and in high demand, i.e. Lynn Terry. If they waited for admin approval on every new user request, there would become a huge backlog of requests, unless they also have a backup to themselves.

[Kit Singleton]

[Mel]

[robert adams]

depending on the forum software you are using and how you have it setup, there is usually no way to judge whether a prospective registrant meets any kind of membership criteria or not.

In most cases, if the board is setup correctly, there is no need for admin approval if the purpose is to keep out the spammers etc.

If using phpBB for instance, you can install a very simple MOD that will stop 100% of the spam registrations before they become members. That way, there is no reason for setting approval to "admin".


robert

[Mel]

True it will stop the spam registrations & you can set it up to block certain names or keywords, ip address, etc but if you put too many restrictions on it, it'll block legit people too.

However, some spammers are legit people and know how to squeak in under the radar. By manual approving them, we are able to check their url, profile details, email address and such. This helps eliminate about 98% of the non-bot spammers. For example, there is one "business opportunity" that we had loads of new members joining to just spam us with their opportunity. By checking new member profiles, we were able to eliminate those before they even got started.

[Kit Singleton]