Regarding Verifying New Members

[RetroTyphlosion]

Hey PokemonForever,

So, we're all aware of the spam bots that plagued our website last year. They were our largest problem with the site. To combat this, the mods decided to make it that all new accounts must be verified by an admin. Since then, we have received zero spam threads.

However, is it totally worth it?

We all know that our website is rather low in traffic. We need new members if we plan to keep our website alive. However, our new members cannot post right away. Because of this, very few of our new members stick around. That doesn't work. 

While the spam bots are annoying, I have heard that they are fairly easy to deal with, and don't really do anything to the site besides take up space. So, is our defense against spam bots really worth severely hurting our chances of gaining new traffic?

[RetroTyphlosion]

Tagging @Agro and @stephenWITNESS

[stephenWITNESS]

What's up Retro! It's been a miniute :D We've had the regestration bact to normal for a few weeks now and so far all seems to be good. The concern is appreciated and hopefully we won't need to approve new accounts in the future. It was just something that we, unfortunately, needed to do at the time.

[RetroTyphlosion]

@stephenWITNESS Wow man, it really has been so long, I've missed you 

Are you sure about the normal registration, though? All the new members I've seen show up with the status of "account not verified".

[stephenWITNESS]

Yep it's definitely back to normal. There are a few potential spam accounts that weren't approved thpugh, so it could be those that your seeing