This is, frankly, an asinine way to approach spam prevention. First, the vast majority of forum users are NOT spammers. In five years of the Expression Web forum, we have had perhaps five or six instances
in total! Second, at least for our forum, the very people who need the help the most are those who are least likely to have the forum experience to be "verified" by the nebulous requirements that Forum Issues has prescribed. Third, for the
great majority of assistance requests in the Web forum, those involving page display, we
must have access to the page
in situ, with all the markup, CSS, images, scripting, etc. available for us to analyze and determine the problem. This is
NOT optional. Forbidding the posting of links negates the very purpose of the damned forum.
I personally feel that this reveals a marked, and shameful, laziness on the part of the forum developers or admins. Rather than implement one of the known effective methods of spam prevention, CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA, email response double opt-in, etc., they have
decided to simply assume that everyone who needs help in one of the forums is a spammer, a patently ridiculous assumption on the face of it, and implemented requirements which new users find impossible to meet, even if they knew what
they were.
How about you guys at Forum Issues get off your lazy asses, and implement a workable spam prevention policy that doesn't automatically assume that every new user is a spammer, and that provides a reasonable, known path to verification, so that the very users
for whom these forums are of the most need can use them in the way they are intended to be used.
Please remember to "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue. It is common courtesy to recognize those who have helped you, and it also makes it easier for visitors to find the resolution later.
