Nursery for New Members

is it 24hours from account activation or from the creation of the account? I like the idea of the nursery, wish more forums would adopt it.

It's 24 hours from registration (but you had to have activated your account for it to work), plus 2 posts.

So it works in various ways... registered a year ago, only activated yesterday and posted twice today? That'll work.

The promotions (letting people out of the nursery) happen every hour or so automatically.

Most of the time when people email me to ask to be let out, they are already out before I get to do it for them.

Oh, and just checked the stats, we are automatically banning just shy of 10 spammers a week. This is solely based on the nursery period allowing me to detect post submissions when it shouldn't be possible. It's a sign that spammers use scripts to submit automatically to many forums, so it makes it easy to detect. Most spam also happens to be about cheap chinese shoes, so that's also easy to detect.

So whilst the nursery is a pain in the arse for new members who want to rebel against it, it is provably keeping a lot of spam off of the forum. It reduces the "human spam" down to a manageable level.