Registration approvals

[Rich Z]

Recently I had to change the way registrations are handled on this site. About 10 days ago I noticed a lot of Chinese IP addresses logged into here, and that seemed like a bad sign. So I made the registration process more stringent than normal, anticipating problems. That meant email addresses needed to be verified by new registrations, and I set it so that I have to approve all new registrations before they can post here. That means I check IP addresses to see where the registration is REALLY coming from, and boot out any that are from countries that typically spawn spammers.

Sure enough, I've blocked several each day now, whereas spamming was nearly a non-existent problem before.

I also set it so that guests (meaning anyone not registered or registered by not logged in) cannot view most of the forums. I wanted to try to make this site as unappealing as possible to those Chinese IP addresses visiting here. This will only be a temporary measure, however, since such a setting also negates the positive benefits of web crawling spiders to index the site in the search engines.

Just wanted to let people know what is going on. I will open this Feedback forum to viewing by guests so anyone interested might be able then to figure out what is going on here.

Thanks...