Forum Update: User Activation

[Admin]

I'm sure many of you have noticed that people join the forum here but do not post anything, and to that I think I may have come up with a solution!

When someone joins the forum here I need to personally activate his/her account. Why do I do this? Because a spammer can register and just blast the forum with hundreds of spam topics/replies in a matter of MINUTES! This happened a few years ago and was a big pain to correct! It literally to me hours to fix the situation.

Usually when a user is deleted on a forum the posts still stay, but I recently came across a add-on that I installed here on the forum to delete all the posts along with that user if I want to. This way, if a spammer registers and blasts the board with spam I can delete all the posts with a click of a button!!!

Now that I can do this I have changed registration from "Admin Confirmation" to "User Confirmation" - this way, someone can register, confirm their registration through e-mail, and begin posting right away! I think that when people register and have to wait for me to activate their account they lose interest in the forum. Why would they register if they had no intention to post? Every few months I usually delete 5-10 users that were legit registrations, but they never posted anything (just taking up room in the database) so hopefully now we can retain those 5-10 users every few months and get them posting.

In the case the forum does suffer a spam attack I can easily correct the situation in a matter of seconds, so no worries there.

Hopefully we'll see even more new faces around the forum!!!