Long time for registration to be approved.

I attempted to apply for this site on Feb 15, 2009 7:43 AM, there was a captcha which I had to fill in. A day later on Feb 16, 2009 2:53 PM I was approved to post on this site. I don't see any point of approval of registration when this site already has captcha.

Why not remove all registration requirements and have non-registered editors fill in a captcha everytime they post?

This way more people will edit and the forum database will increase, allowing everyone to have more answers to this incredibly difficult to use software. At the very least the admin approval needs to be removed.

I must apologize for those

I must apologize for those long waits. Approval duty usually goes to me, and one other, though I'm a developer at screen-scraper just like anybody else there. When those projects pile up, I have admitably neglected it a bit too much.

So that you know though, manual approval is an absolute *MUST*. You would be appalled at the shear number of spam users who can still read captchas. We're using Drupal for our content management on the community-end of the site. Any time you use a main-stream framework like that, you can expect to be hammered upon by the russians (I don't know why they have an affinity for spamming).

97% of all our user signups are spammers. We have a decent number of real people who sign up, but that only stands in contrast when you think about it. We recently updated Drupal to its newest version, and overnight we had about 700% more spammers than normal who tried to register accounts.

So while the manual approval will stay in place, I promise to be better at approving people more quickly.

Apologies,
Tim

Long time for registration to be approved.

I have just waited 3 days (Feb 17 @14:59 - Feb 20 @00:06 GMT) to gain access to the forum. I agree that the process needs to be speeded up. I expected a reply within a hour, which is in my experience the norm.

Cheers Tarka