One thing I didn't count on when switching to this new message board format was the relentlessness with which international spam artists try to gain membership and post their links to their nefarious scams. It's really quite stunning. Every day, I receive 5-10 requests for posting membership on this board, most of them coming from people who spend literally HOURS trying to post a spam message on the board. Even if they're successful in spending time skirting the CAPTCHA gateway and getting manually approved, their message will only spend a maximum of 6-10 hours on the site before it's removed and they're banned forever.

Seriously-- is a momentary spam posting that lasts an hour or three before they're being banned and having their post removed worth all that effort? It's really stunning to me. I'm trying to imagine what the profit margin could possibly be to warrant all that effort for such little possible return. Yet it continues, daily.

If you are a legitimate, earnest poster who has been denied membership, I apologize. There is no attempt here to limit discussion or suppress dialogue. You may send me a heads-up email at e.fivesales [at] gmail.com to let me know that you're legitimate, and I will approve you as soon as I see it.

63...thanks for staying a leg up on these scammers.

Now I'm getting as many as 35 attempts to register from spam artists every day-- about one every 45 minutes. The guy who runs the MVC conference message board says he gets about 100 per day.

So if you haven't registered on this board yet-- and think you might like to-- I'd encourage you to do so now to prevent any problems from me being overwhelmed by spam requests in the future.

I appreciate the folks who don't contribute much and don't really plan to-- you are vital members of this community! I hope you join now to allow unfettered access if/when there's a bottleneck in approving new memberships. I have a strict policy against spam messages, and now that this board is being run internally rather than through a third party, I have much more control over that. I cannot see your passwords or internal communications-- that is all (rightfully) blocked off from me by the software platform.

In the three months this board has been operating, I haven't deleted a single post besides spam messages. I trust that the community here can help monitor the site through dialog to keep the proceedings civil and relevant. So, there is essentially no censorship here-- besides that which removes systematic abuse by agents paid to place irrelevant commercial messages.