At account creation time, throw in an image-test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) in to help weed out bots.
Hmm... actually, the account-creation page is REALLY busy now. Consider breaking it into 2 pages:
First page: isolate the 3 dozen informational / background questions.
2nd page: account id, permanent-email, image test.
Page #2) will make it less painful to loop in the event of account-id's already being used collisions.
I'm not saying it would be impossible to defeat this, but getting past the image validation, and correlating an email-reply with automated requests requires rather more energy.
As for spammers that defeat the above process, handle them manually. People can complain about "Hey, id 'jgreve' is posting spam - suspend their account!" or whatever in the admin forum.
p.s. a neat looking library for PHP/image-validation: http://www.ejeliot.com/pages/2
(not that I know anything about php; don't touch the stuff myself ).
[/url]sud wrote:Actually we can have new registrations only through two channels :chulett wrote:... another such way is a manual approval step for new posters, but that puts a burden on Walter and may prove a barrier to growth. Anyone sign up with ADN way back when it was a one man manual process and remember how long you had to wait before you could start posting?...
1> Through reference from an existing user
2> Manual Approval from Walter
That way Walter won't get killed with requests