The dumbest thing a forum owner can do =
 

I was doing some thinking and realized that I have never returned to a I joined that required manual verifications (once you sign up a mod or admin has to approve your account). When someone joins your forum it is usually at a time when they are ready to make a new thread, unless your forum requires members to register before viewing topics which is even stupider because your threads won't be spidered on google. Anyways, thats why I join forums and when I can't post the thread right away, I just find another forum for the same topic which you can always find and join there, verify my email, and bookmark the post. I then ignore the acceptance email from the 1st forum I tried to join.

There are other ways to get out spammers and bad apples.

i agree its fucking annoying. I once joined a wm forum several times, and it was constantly declined by the webmaster, i couldnt understand it. Seemed all fields were set on mandatory or something, if theyd have a field of 'whats your favourite color' even that wouldve been mandatory.... retarded shit

there are reasons why it's done, obviously owners know it may ward off some posters but the benefits outweigh it

I require registration on my forum to post but its instant verifacation not webmaster approved.

Another killer is when a noob thinks he can niche the board out into 15 different forums. Like someone is going to click on all those to read the five threads in each one.