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During the last week I have visited the modeltrainforum.com site. The layout is similar to this one and I didn't understand why there are very few visitors and/or posters until I tried to post. I tried to post an answer to a question on how to put up a picture and a message came up saying it is an illegal post. When trying again it said that the first 10 posts are moderated before being shown. Guess I'll join the others that visited and moved on. The moderators need to lighten up and get a life already.
I'm afraid I have to agree with their method in principle. As a moderator on the free-for-all Model Railroader forums (think cat that goes "Aaackkkk!"), I would luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv to have software that requires all newbies (including Al Mayo), to have to wait until I vet his registration, and then monitor his first several posts before we give him the keys to the city. I don't know the place of which you speak, never been there, but the folks who run it obviously want to run a tight ship. I have been on a number of forums with this 'admission' requirement, or probationary status. It makes sense.
Not, of course, to disparage the good folks here. I have always felt that I was with colleagues and friends here. It is a haven from the madhouse 'over there'.
But, I have always been service-oriented, and I am paying my dues as a moderator in a tough milieu.
I can understand trying to do something about the scammers, spammers, and other riff raff that these forums have to deal with but sometimes its a bit much. I wont mention it, but one model train forum I signed up for I didnt post anything for over a month as I was only there to learn up and get to know the place before I posted anything. Well since I didnt post anything, my account got canceled and my email appears to have been put on thier "black list" or whatever because I cant even use that email anymore to sign (back) up.
Which is fine really, I dont need to have an account to read the posts which was all I wanted anyways. I hung around here for a few months before I decided to make my first post. This forum is seems to be one of the more helpfull forums anyways.
This must be a very new policy with them. I posted immeadiately after I registered and it was displayed immeadiately. No problems. You may want to check with their moderator.
During the last week I have visited the modeltrainforum.com site. The layout is similar to this one and I didn't understand why there are very few visitors and/or posters until I tried to post. I tried to post an answer to a question on how to put up a picture and a message came up saying it is an illegal post. When trying again it said that the first 10 posts are moderated before being shown. Guess I'll join the others that visited and moved on. The moderators need to lighten up and get a life already.
Sorry you were having issues. I'll attempt to address that here.
As the others mentioned in this thread, it's tough to keep on top of all the spam accounts and such that come with trying to run a forum. Rest assured there was no human on the other end deciding to make your life difficult.
There is some software installed that detects spam postings and moderates them, and naturally we get a couple false positives every now and then. There are some messages in places about this on the site but not everyone will see it I guess. But thank you for bringing this up, because I may need to revisit the settings on that software.
For what it's worth we get at least a couple new people every day making their first post without issue. I invite you to come back to the site to see how we are doing
However, that is not the reason there there are few posters/people over there. It's by nature a smaller site and has less activity, BUT these days we are getting 40-50 members logging in which is a far cry from what it used to be...
i run a forum once for a small gamer community. as i found, administration is not an easy task (and thankless mostly) so whatever policies are were adopted i can see the reason, even if they somewhat draconian (which is nearly not the case here). and even with that, if you noticed, we get an occasional jerk that starts messing things up.
It is a haven from the madhouse 'over there'.
