Don't know what the rate of new membership is historically--of course it ebbs and flows. But, I just noticed that the last new member, Scandynava, joined us over 2 weeks ago and has not posted. That seems tragically slow.

Anything we can do to promote the forum? Thanks.

bring back the house/smug debates?

That won't cut it, sadly.
How about gearhead/the world debates?

If I am not mistaken, Steve can speak more about it, but there is a verification process with new accounts that takes a while. This is to eliminate spammers..

There are a couple of issues. First, it's a slow time of the year for sign-ups. Our last big glut (surrise, surprise) was when the L-Factor announced his return. The second issue is one of logistics. We've had to implement some pretty drastic sign up requirements to prevent spammers from registering / spamming the forums. The sign-up process looks like this now:

1. Person decides to sign up, hits the "sign-up" button
2. Fills out info
3. System sends him an e-mail that he has to verify reciept of
4. System then kicks a notificaiton to an admin (me)
5. Admin (me and ONLY me) has to divine from the user name and e-mail address if we have an actual live, interested in cycling person, or some clever spamming software that does all the above steps automagically.
6. The Admin, taking his best guess, approves or denies the member request.

Right now, to give you an idea, we're getting roughly 50-100 spam membership applications per actual membership application. By that, I mean that I get 50-100 requests past the first 4 steps. We get about 1-2k attempts to sign up every week that do not make it past the first hurdle.

I literally have my thumb in the dike. If I take it out, or reduce the complexity of signing up, we'll go back to all the drug / porn / penile enlargement / Natural! Sexual! Performance! spam that we had about 18 months ago.

Thanks for the explanation.

Just out of curiosity, why doesn't CAPTCHA work? I know another board that uses the same process you describe and always wondered. Thanks.

Because the software has gotten smart enough that the run through all the possible CAPTCHA images (most sites use very few - this Board's software uses either 12 or 36, IIRC), and then circumvent it.

Brutal. Even reCAPTCHA, or does the board support that?

Steve,

I'm sorry that the process takes so much of your time. It's a shame that it is neccessary. Still I appreciate the fact that you do it, and we don't have to put up with all the crap that we would otherwise.

Thanks for your efforts.

I haven't had time to study / learn / evaluate. Or desire, for that matter...

Understood, just sounded overwhelming and a potential bottleneck to approve manually, and was trying to help.