My suggestion for limiting SPAM

On another site, where the forum is run on Discus software, we had a problem with a guy who called himself Zolly (a.k.a. master of the plex) and wanted $500 for a copy of Platoon. He did some major spamming and wouldn't quit. He kept getting banned and kept coming back as another user with Zol or Plex in the name because you can just reregister and don't have to have a valid email address. So they changed the site and now you have to wait 1-2 days to be registered by having a valid email address and the mods check your username to make sure it's appropriate (or that your name isn't ZolPlex). Maybe you could do that on here.

I don't run any forums, so I don't know if it can be done, how much more work it would create for you mods, or how much you even get payed for running this place/how much it costs to run this forum. But I think that if it takes time to get registered, just that small amount of time will discourage someone who already has a username on here to register another one in a couple of seconds just to go write some nonsense (wouldn't want to damage the reputation of your good username, would you?). When people have to go out of their way to do something silly, they usually end up not doing it. So what do you think? Could you set it up that way?

that sounds like a good idea, but with the amount of people signing up every day, i think that would be a major task for us moderators. We don't get payed anything to do this (and certainly don't expect to), we do it because we want to :D. And we are having a problem with a certain individual who keeps signing up with crude names and posting a link to their site (remember, thats what the 'report to moderator' link is for ;)) but yeah. It does sound like a good idea, but i don't know whether it would be practical in the running of this particular site.

- funkyhorror -

It's nice to hear that you do this because you want to. But who owns this site and how much does it cost them to run it? I've heard of figures around the $10,000/month mark to run a site with a forum. But since this site sells Matrix memoribilia, that should help substantially with the costs of running the site.

The current setup requires someone to give a valid email address that hasn't been used before to sign up. So unless someone creates a new email account somewhere they can't sign up again. I don't know if this helps to fight spam, but it sure makes life somewhat harder for the people who try to reregister after being banned ;).