Read this:
Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.
I'd love to have less spam, especially from bots, but I don't expect theymos to add more restrictions to new registrations.
I would like to see much more bans. If I check
some random spammers on BPIP, many of them have many deleted posts, but aren't banned. Even posts reported for
plagiarism don't always lead to a ban. The chances of getting caught for plagiarism or spam are low, as it's humans fighting against bots. If those spam bots get second, thirth ... and even tenth chances, it feels very demotivating to report them.
That gets me on to another point. Can we please stop this backseat modding? What I mean by this is instead of reporting the topic you just post what they should of done or attack the user for spamming and all you are doing is promoting their spam by bumping their thread. Just report it and move on.
You can report the posts that quote spam or off-topic posts too (that's what I do)
The thing is that there are so many already unbanned inactive registered accounts, that even if you wanted to restrict accounts from registering, setting into motion whatever set of verifications or restrictions, we’ll likely get a lot of already inactive registered accounts coming back to life with a market for them.
Considering the fact I've seen "incidents" where there are suddenly 6000 more registrations than usual on one day, I wouldn't be against banning all Brand New accounts that are more than a month old. Make this a one-time thing, so spam bots don't get a reason to start spamming with their new accounts, and this won't hurt many real users, while disabling hundreds of thousands of sleeping spam accounts that are waiting to be activated.
As an alternative, it would be good to add "units of evil" to existing Brand New accounts, even if the IP wasn't evil when they registered. That means a spam bot that registered many accounts at once will be punished on all accounts if some of his accounts get banned.