Realy No Gmail Hotmail Accounts?

[fastturtle]

If you are having problems with spammers flooding the forums, then you need to change the settings a bit. My suggestion is pretty straight forward. Do as /. does (contact them for the code) and limit posting speed to some reasonable level such as 5-10 seconds before you can post. It's not going to affect people other then when they type a quick response to something that hits the trigger (I've seen it 5 times in last year on /. so can state it's not onerous).

A 2nd anti-flooding feature to implement is rate limiting. Limit to a reasonable number of posts (10-15) with decreasing time with more posts - If exceeded, lock em out for 12-24 hours with explanation as to why and limit this to accounts less then 30 days old or with low number of posts (flooders will post once, then wait out noob period before flooding - reason for the posting limit) if caught ban them, which works pretty well on the forums that use it.

One of the reasons I and many others feel that singling out Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo is that none of the free mail services vet/authenticate the user. Hell even my ISP doesn't authenticate/verify users and will gladly accept what every name you want if it's not already taken or is a registered trademark such as MS, so this action is being discrimatory against folks like myself who've used Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo for several years (over 6 for me) as their primary addy - means we don't have to teach everyone how to conntact us when we move/change ISP's or get out of school.

I use Gmail due to excellent filtering and long data retentions. My ISP tends to get flooded with spam and I rarely check it since I don't use a mail client anylonger (Gmail's web interface works fine and is accessible where ever I'm at - I frequently travel and have a smartphone).

Another issue is all of the SBC-Yahoo customers (15M+) that have Yahoo as their mail provider/portal. Then you have the various universities that are moving to Gmail as their mail providers (my brothers school did that) instead of them continuing to host it. Makes lots of sense as people retain their email address after they've graduated/left school (one of my reasons for never using the provided address).

[botg]

Delays won't help against a million different spammers posting just a single post.

[igcompany]

You would get a lot more users with Gmail and Hotmail ...

[donmorgan]

What would constitute spamming on a forum. Don't want to sound dumb, however I'm a newbie trying to learn. Thanks

[boco]

What would constitute spamming on a forum.

Both your and your predecessor's spam signatures, for example. I have removed them now, but next time the accounts will be disabled.