[carn1x]

As you can tell, I'm almost as noob as they come on these boards, but my first thought is of horror and recoil at the spam protection on these boards.

Is there any way that a user could verify their account to remove the spam protection, or maybe lighten the protection a bit after a user hits a number of posts (I see the problem with that suggestion, but just throwing it out there) ?

I imagine that communities such as this like to welcome new members as much as possible, but there's this real fat road block that certainly can't be helping. The extent of the spam protection in place clearly indicates these boards have been stung before, probably many times, by bots, so I'm probably digging up the topic for about the billionth time, but I just thought I'd throw a new users perspective out there.

Is there any form of OpenID verification that gets around this spamming issue, can OpenID even do that?

In addition but unrelated, I'm actually from Nigeria, but for some reason my accounts got frozen and...

[General Battuta]

This is actually the first time the issue's been raised because spam protection was only implemented a few days ago.

What exactly are the issues you're having? Whatever it is I believe it goes away after you make a few posts.

[Fury]

Seems like someone increased number of required posts to have before spam-protection is lifted to 5. It used to be 3. I've disabled it completely since there have been no reports of spammers lately.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Actually Kara had to swat a bot yesterday. 

[Fury]

5 is still way too high since it's more likely to do harm by annoying new people than do good. A small number like 2 or 3 should be sufficient, but regardless of the number it'll never stop all spam, particularly if there's a person doing the dirty work.

[Goober5000]

I've had to swat a few bots myself.  They hadn't posted yet, but they already had spam in their signatures.

I'm re-enabling it, but setting the threshold to 3.  It used to be 0 actually, so I just pulled 5 out of a hat.

[Fury]

Fair enough then.

[karajorma]

I still think we should ban sigs until you have 5 posts. End of problem with bots registering for sig links. And anyone actually spamming would be deleted quickly.

[Fury]

I still think we should ban sigs until you have 5 posts. End of problem with bots registering for sig links. And anyone actually spamming would be deleted quickly.

We'd need a mod to do that unfortunately, but it is possible yes. I also encourage this.

[Mobius]

I still think we should ban sigs until you have 5 posts. End of problem with bots registering for sig links. And anyone actually spamming would be deleted quickly.

We'd need a mod to do that unfortunately, but it is possible yes. I also encourage this.

Seems like the perfect solution.