should we use banning in the forum, if the gallery isn't using it?

Hi Friends,

I just wanted to provide a space for discussing this, in case others have comments or opinions.

First, I was wondering if we need to bother with banning. It's like going into the woods without wearing insect repellant, and planning to swat the bugs one at a time with your hands.

Then I realized that we don't ban members who are deleted through gallery moderation. And I don't use banning on Inkscape Community, because all our other security is so strong. We've had extremely few spammers! So forums can exist successfully without using banning.

At my request, Martin installed....I'm not sure what it's called but it interacts the StopForumSpam databases with the Inkscape website (and forum) registration. This is a very strong security measure, in my opinion. And of course we have the reCaptcha. I don't actually know whether bots can solve them or not. If not, our security is probably sufficient.

There's only one more way I can think of, to strengthen security, which I'll mention below. But even without it, I'm thinking it might be safe to skip the banning entirely.

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments or opinions about this?

(The one additional security measure I can suggest would be to ask the potential new members to do something which bots can't do - read and follow instructions. Just a simple instruction to follow a link, and retrieve some specific info from that page. Let's say the link happens to go to the CoC, and asks them to read the Guidelines to User Submitted Contents section, and answer this. "What should images uploaded to the website be related to?" The answer is in the first sentence: "Inkscape". I'd be surprised if a bot could do that.

Or the challenge could be much simpler. "What's the 10th word in the first sentence?" Or it could even be simpler than that. Then the member types in the answer. And the right answer allows the registration to go through. (Although we might have to be clever to allow it to work with different language translations.)

Anyway, it would serve a double purpose. Make sure the applicant is human, and make sure they read the most important thing. (Most important for moderators, anyway, haha!)

But anyway, I don't think the current banning interface in the forum is working properly. If we decide not to use banning anyway, it could just be deleted, rather than fixing it.

Thanks!