IKs' has notified me about a new

[Jackie]

I have to add my two cents here, for what it's worth. The policy that the Wine Lover's Page is implementing requires every new person to basically wait for approval before they can post. The approval is a manual process. Someone (like me) would be responsible for monitoring emails from those who want to join the board, then manually registering them, etc. before they could do anything on the board.

To me, this is really discouraging to the newcomers who are legitimately wanting to join us. It makes everyone wait to be manually approved, just because some spammers are annoying us. I'm really not sure that the trade-off is worth it.

There are forums that are monitored only by TEAM. I'm trying to figure out what the password is for TEAM, so I can get into these forums and delete spammers. Any of our admins who know this, please email me at jackie@wines.com.

Our old bulletin board system was able to block spammers by IP address. Also, we could easily ban/delete a username, if that user was abusing the board. I don't know the new system because it was developed specifically for this forum (not a commercial software package)... and the code was written just for Wines.com. I will try to figure this out for us here... and see if we can't fix things that way.

Having everyone manually approved is a last resort, in my opinion, because it penalizes everyone who wants to join us... and you know that people don't like to wait for anything.... They will likely just stay away from the board. What if it takes me a day or more to get back to them? They'll just lose interest... I don't know how many will bother to come back and post after waiting. Or how many newcomers we will just lose.

That's my concern. I would like this place to be as accommodating and easy-to-join as possible.

It's a huge trade-off... we really need to consider this carefully. If there's ANY other way, I'd suggest trying that first.

Jackie