On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 5:59 AM, Mark Lentczner wrote:

On Oct 10, 2010, at 10:56 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

I'm worried about spam accounts being featured on the homepage. Real Haskeller is not meant to be exclusive, it's a minimal level of oversight by the admins.

A more common approach to the problem of spam accounts -- which is very real -- is to not allow accounts to appear before they have been vetted by an admin. Allowing accounts to appear on the site as they are created will, sooner or later, result in the site being over run with spam faster than you can keep up.

For the community site I help run (http://www.contextfreeart.org/) had this problem a while back and we switched to all accounts being vetted. We use http://www.stopforumspam.com/ as source of information to easily help us make that determination.

That may very well be the direction we need to take it. For the moment, since spam has *not* been a problem yet, I've erred on the side of being too liberal. But if necessary, I can convert the "real Haskeller" status to indicate whether an account is shown at all or not. However, this may never be necessary: I'm not sure how much it bothers me that a spam account could appear at the very bottom of the search listings. And the feeling on this list seems to be for *less* admin control, not more. But as I said, all options such as this are in reserve. Michael