The moderator approval system...

… is the most annoying thing i ever stumbled across in any internet forum. It is a real superior way to chase away spammers and new forum members alike. :rolleyes: (sorry, that had to be said).

I understand your frustration, but with the limited number of moderators we have (and our limited availability), this really is the best solution for preventing spam on our forums. Of course, we’re always open to hearing suggestions of other/better ways of handling it, so please share yours.

I do not know if it is technical possible with the forum software, but one idea that came to my mind was to give trustworthy forum members (e.g. minimum 100 posts or more) the chance to help with approval and maybe introduce a ranklist (to find the “approver of the week/month/year”) as motivation or the like.

We are, in fact, planning a move from VBulletin to Discourse, and Discourse does actually support features like that, if I recall correctly. Once we do the move, that’s something we’re definitely interested in investigating.