Do you approve new members?

I've been doing this for the past few months and I believe its a great way to yield out the spammers.

So does anyone else here approve new members?

 

No, Spammer tools take care of that.

 

Using email validation at the moment, built in spammer tools deals with the rest

 

I use the email validation and have the IPB spammer stuff, but I still approve new members.

 

I just have auto activation as i seem to not get spam bots i have some protection aswell obviously which is 2 verifications which new members have to fill out in order to register to the forum.

 

My spam tools handle that as well, but I just like doing it just incase the spam blocker misses a user.

my spam o matic stats

 

Well there are some pretty good spam tools for XenForo. I haven't had one spammer get through so far. However, the log of spammers denied is huge.

 

My Forum also has Email Verification set up, But I know sometimes Emails from my Forum end up in the Junk Folder, especially if it's a Hotmail Email, so I do manually approve any Accounts that look like they have legit details entered in their profile.

 

No way. I'd be worried about losing members if they had to wait for their accounts to be approved. Solvemedia stops bots.

 

I used to as well but stopped since using....that spam script can't remember the name.

 

I totally agree, I would never use account approval on the forums that I own for that very reason. Some of the forums I run on behalf of the owner do use it so I know to some extent how many potential new members they lose and it's a lot.

 

Wow! What is the lifetime on that? I think that approving the members is a great addition and prefer it. It helps promote that the admin is actively participating with the members. It helps validate how good the forum is.

 

They usually only wait a few hours or 30 minutes. It all depends on what staff member is online. We haven't lost any members because of this. In fact, they're more excited to join the community because they lurked for awhile.

 

Where is the log in XF? I haven't seen something similar to vB's Spam-O-Matic log.

 

sonnb - Stop Spam Here - Logs

That app keeps a log of all rejections.

 

When did VPL start manually approving new members?

 

We've been doing it like this for about 6 months ago or so.

 

I dont do this as its not effective, I dont want members to wait a long time before being able to post, I want them to be able to start posting right away, thats why I have anti spam plugins

 

If you mean manual validation, no. I just use email validation and some good anti spam questions along with some spam blacklist services. No real problems yet.

 

Using only email validation and sortables captcha. Works very well against bots, while humans who subscribe and decide to spam are booted.