Hiya,
i know you don't necessarily want user moderation, but somehow combined with the 'Verify' option this is the only way how you can really stem the flood of spam also for registered users. I switched some while ago from a free for all process to full user moderation and since then my boards are clean of spam. With the e-mail verification alone you won't be able to control users that sign quickly a hotmail account up for spamming purposes. Quite often you can already according to the mail address used assume that an account is used by a spammer. My boards deal with depression and i get shed loads of registrations for example with the domain medicinese.info (or something like that it was). A pure online pharmacy spam site. And you can automate this a bit by excluding known spam domains in filters/bademail. My forums policy is straight forward..... somebody pees me of and they are banned for good including full block of their IPs on the firewall. Spammers from the UK have another surprise waiting, they get an invoice of £500 per spam message i have to remove. My latest victim was a school where one pupil thought it is fun to spam my boards with an advert for a gaming site. But as it was a school i was content with an open apology by the head mistress of the school
. Sometimes it is a shame that canes aren't allowed anymore
