Stopping spammers from signing up

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Darn.  I thought I was going to get that in before your second post.  Oh well!

I remember a few years ago, we set it up so that mods had to approve new accounts.  It was a way to deal with troll infestations occasionally, but as a normal thing, it's not great.  Those people who were interested in posting signed up and then had to wait until we got around to approving their account sometime in the next 24 or 48 hours.  Doesn't make for a great welcome to new people, especially in an internet world where people can sign up for sites practically instantly and start using them.  If sign-ups actually are down, as is your impression, that would only make them drop further.

Also, it was a pain in the butt having to monitor yet another queue.  Mods have enough to do in their very limited time, and they already put in far more hours than the ones they're paid to work. 

Finally, when people sign up with an account, it's not just for babble anymore since the site moved to Drupal.  It's for the entire site as a whole, and making them wait because of spammers on babble would mean also making people who want to sign up to do other things in other areas of the site wait as well.  And you would be surprised just how many people sign up every day - way more than actually post on babble right away, or at least that used to be the case.

Spammers suck and so do trolls, but I don't think the benefit of screening them out would outweigh the time that screening memberships would take, nor the harm caused by making genuine would-be members wait to sign in.  When people want to comment on something, they won't necessarily want to come back in 24 hours to do it.

I don't work at rabble anymore, so I have no say in this, just putting in my 2 cents based on past experience trying this.