Moderated membership

Dear valued Members,

this serves to announce that for the time being we have switched to "moderated membership", which means that new members signing up to the Japan Forum will have to be approved individually before being able to post to the forum.

Resulting in a slight increase in workload for the admins and a short timespan new signups will have to be patient for, it also prevents unwelcome members, read "unsolicited advertisers", from posting.

We'll be testing this setup for a few days to see whether it's feasible or not. Thanks for your understanding.

does this mean new members will not be able to even respond to posts before a moderator gives them the ok? I thought they were already restricted from making new threads (as a way to curb solicitation)

Ahhhh ! That explaines why .......

new members are not showing up under the "Newest Member" section , but do show up under who's been on line section.

Uncle Frank

There were no previous restrictions in posting for new members, only in adding links and graphics to their posts (until they reached a certain number of posts). Under the setup we are testing now, they can only respond once their account has been approved, which is usually within minutes, but might take a few hours at most.

Just to clarify: it's a one-time user account approval, not a per-post procedure.

We implemented the same policy on our cycling forum and haven't had a spammer there (or for that matter, complaints by impatient users) in almost seven years.

I offer my stamp of approval.