Spam Messages and registration of new users

[admin]

I just removed a large number of spam messages.
In order to reduce the registrations of fake accounts and spam, I recently changed the registration from the security questions to an image with numbers that users have to type in. This did not work well and the number of spam messages increased faster than I could remove them. I therefore want to try the following:

Reintroducing the security questions (which I changed)
Manual approval of the registrations by the admin.
As I can not know if a registration is real or not by the email address or name, I will require that the person send me an additional "application" email.

I hope that this will work better.
Oliver

[Dubious]

I just removed a large number of spam messages.
In order to reduce the registrations of fake accounts and spam, I recently changed the registration from the security questions to an image with numbers that users have to type in. This did not work well and the number of spam messages increased faster than I could remove them. I therefore want to try the following:

Reintroducing the security questions (which I changed)
Manual approval of the registrations by the admin.
As I can not know if a registration is real or not by the email address or name, I will require that the person send me an additional "application" email.

I hope that this will work better.
Oliver

Yeah, the spam artists have gotten quite clever (or their software has). If this new method of preventing spam does not work, or proves too time consuming, some have suggested having volunteers vet the first X postings of new users. Apparently that method has worked very well at some other sites.

[Hobbyst46]

Thanks, Oliver !

Nice to have a fresh ,clean and focused board !

[WWWW]

Well done !!

[perrywespa]

Thank you!!

[grgh4]

Thank you Oliver, I was getting confused sometimes whether I’d landed on a gaming site?.