What is the best practice? At the moment I am making people who sign up activate their accounts via email to prevent spam. What I have also noticed though is that i get 1 or 2 members per month who dont activate.
I know this forum doesnt activate, is it worth doing or do you get a lot of spam messages?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated ;-)
I would say unless you have an issue with spammers keep it as no email activation as it causes some extra inconvenience for the user signing up.
Most spammers (9/10) use real emails anyway so even if it s required they can still spam and if it is bots that are signing up the email wouldn't cause hardly any extra inconvenience for it as it is a robot. Most spam bots nowadays use real emails anyway... Human spammers (which we get here occasionally usually from China) all use real ones so it is pointless unless you want to inconvenience them slightly and inconvenience your real members also which could result in some members signing up and not activating their account because they have forgotten about it or when they got to their email the next day they weren't interested anymore.
In the event of spamming it on mass it would be better to use email validation as then people need to use real emails and they will get bored quicker having to make new emails.
For your average forum you would have any real need for it.
Experience for me with spam-bot registrations means I have e-mail activation and my host has disabled to no activation option because there were too many forums suffering from spam (including pornography).
