Member approval protocol question

[Agatha]

I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, but I am curious on feedback from all of you who are very experienced forum managers.

I recently joined the team on a forum and they have a practice I find odd. But maybe this is just something I do not know about.

They do not allow people to sign up using a vpn or tor. And the sign up approval process requires a mod to go in to the sign up request, ip check a member signing up, and list their ip info: member number, state/country, ip address, time they signed up and user name....in a thread on the mod board in a post.

This seems excessive and un needed work to me. But they seem to think it is needed. I know they have had trolls before..bad ones. But I don't know. It just seems a little crazy. Is this common practice on forum admin teams?

Another thing to note..they use SMF. My forum is Xenforo, but their community is similar to mine so I ended up as a mod there. But as someone who runs a xenforo forum with spam detection add on, (and I am sure SMF has something similar), it just seems weird to me and I am wondering if it is something people normally do who run forums.

 

[ENF]

We have a similar process in place but rely on automated tools to do most of the work. I don't think that extreme level of filtering is overly common, but there are a fair number with a strict process. Using Xon's tool, we block whole network via ASN# (VPN's etc aren't permitted) and locations that are a common source of problems... a lot of that manual work is done automatically before we get the account for final approval. (We do not list out these in a mod thread or anything, no need... that's overkill AND it's also a risk to expose private information of members to more people than necessary.) We have extra steps in place to filter out temp email addresses, etc. (Using something like https://verifymail.io/)

 

[Agatha]

Thanks so much. I was just curious since I am very amateur at forum software.

Thank you for the email checker link, too.

 

[jeb35]

People who use vpn's are 99 percent spammers. The forum I help admin is overrun by them. The owner is absent most of the time, been months since he's logged in and won't setup better spam protection.

 

[Agatha]

Makes sense certainly. But the thing is on our sites..they are adult forums. So a lot of regular members use vpns also. I have as well. It is tricky because spammers do also. But I use spam detection on my forum too. And it does filter that stuff. But I do not make a thread for the mods of all the ips/city/etc listed for each approved member. That sort of baffles me.