At the moment there is maximum a hand full of new users per week.
I personally did not see any requests in the inbox since the setting changed.
@EricShulman - Did you get any requests?
But since such a step is a hurdle not all users will take, it is important to go back to normal as soon as possible.
I’m seeing 6, and I’m wondering why no one is approving them? (I’ve approved one, I think) Are we all waiting for each other?
My problem is that I have nothing to go on except an email address, which doesn’t tell you much. If a name incorporates profanity/incivility, I’m not going to approve it, but I won’t delete it either – someone else can make that call.
My feeling is that just delaying the users for awhile prevents spammers from the easy access they crave. I think this is known as “gray-washing” and apparently it’s very effective with email.
Other forums ask newcomers to write a brief paragraph about themselves That definitely makes it easier to weed out “fake” from “real” users. Of course spammers can use AI to generate something, but it takes time, and they need to create thousands of accounts.
So if anyone has tips on “how to decide on new users” please post.
I am under the weather at present, so take this with a grain of salt: I think there is a setting where sign-ups don’t need approval but the first post does. I wonder if that might be a more practical approach.
That sounds like a great approach. With round-the-world and round-the-clock moderation, most users would not need to wait long.
Take care of yourself, there!
Using “first post review” instead of “sign-up approval” would be better, since it would be MUCH easier to recognize the posted content as spam than it is to decide if a username/email address seems suspicious.
-e
I think I’m going to delete the one from mailshan, which is a known temporary email service. Agree? Disagree? Probably do that 3 hours from now.
I’ve deleted (but NOT banned) all 6 pending new users. I think they ALL were spam IDs created around the same time. If any of them are real people, they can always re-join.
-e
As far as I can remember, we also had this approach at the GoogleGroup as I joined. Do you remember?
How many posts where needed there?
I did set it to n … and removed account creation approval. We will see.
I did see 1 account listed for approval. The username and email address was strange. But the site where the email came from did exist. So I did approve the account.
But @Mark_S is right. Only username and e-mail are not really enough to decide. So deciding on the first 3 posts should make it easier.
The new “first post review” setting works GREAT!.. We just got a new user post that was marked for review. When I went to review it, I could immediately see that it was spam content and deleted/banned the new user.
-e
Me too,
It often only needs one in 10,000 to respond to have made it worthwhile. It is part of the asymetic issue that spaming raises. If it costs them nothing do disturb us with a million spams and get 100 responces, 10 of which gets a sale, they have sold more 
We could ask a question such as;
what is the nature of you first post in relation to this discussion forum?
and even also
What do you like about our software.
Note how we dont name tiddlywiki because that may be enough to inform an LLM/AI
This should make it quite easy to differentiate from SPAM. Because I dont think they care about tiddlywiki and are just targeting any discourse.
I think requiring approval for just the first post should suffice.
We can not ask any questions, because that’s not part of the system settings.
IMO with the rise of AI bots, it would not make too much sense, since those answers would probably be good enough to pass automatic tests.