Quote: "This over moderation is absurd, if somebody is found to be a spam bot you could just ban them and what would be so wrong about people expressing themselves freely?"
We do speak quite freely. Granted there's rules to live by, but in just about any respectable online community it's the same, otherwise you just get anarchy, which is extremely unpleasant. The reason I've been an active member for so long is because this forum is such a comfortable place where I can speak freely - granted I can't swear like a sailor as I do in real life, but in recent years I've been very comfortable (as the forums no longer have the 'problem' members it once used to). Also, you seem to be speaking quite freely yourself, nobody's tried stopping you from voicing an opinion despite clearly disagreeing.
You essentially get your first few posts monitored before they are posted. That's it. It's a minor inconvenience. Some forums have other methods - some will let you post, but not create threads for that 'initial' period. Essentially it clears a lot of spam, seriously, websites that attract a lot of traffic are susceptible to a LOT of spam. Even websites I've owned in the past that have been small scale have been subject to spam bots and have had to put measures into place to filter them.
You'd find the same with your emails if you suddenly made your email address extremely public, a number of spam bots will get it and to send emails direct your account and if you're unfortunate that can be a LOT of spam (if your email address was as well known as this site, I suspect you'd get a LOT) so email accounts get a spam filter, a minority get through. Imagine the task of laboriously going through each spam mail individually to delete them and to block the email addresses from your account? These guys are volunteers giving up their free time to moderate a forum, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to not have a filter, even then it would still have a negative impact on the rest of us.
For the minor temporary inconvenience, I think it's worth it. The post moderation really doesn't take long to go away. If you respect forum rules, you'll find you'll never have to go on it again.
