AOL, which yeah, I should probably have dumped years ago, randomly throws some in spam and delivers the rest. It does that with a lot of things.

I'm hoping people who are interested will check once a day or so and see what's new. That's a more reliable way of knowing what's going on.

There's always a balance, true.

If it's just a site to display your books, there are limits to what bots can do. If you allow comments, it's easy enough to moderate them and prevent spam manually unless you have huge traffic. An ecommerce site might be trickier, but more because of what hacks against the guts of the site might cause rather than what a frontend user might do.

If I recall, you do your own programming, which gives you the advantage of structuring security how you want. I'm reliant on others, but generally, I have a site that functions well without excessive security routines. The only thing that irks me a little is that when CloudFlare updated recently, I find myself verifying I'm a human every time. It's just a checkbox, but still, I could probably do without. But if I wanted to, I could lower the security there and rely on my other precautions (like WordFence on the site itself). So far, my legit traffic hasn't dwindled.

Unfortunately, the internet has long been a place where bots will try to create accounts anywhere there's a space, just in case the account can become a way to propagate spam.

When I was still teaching, I had an problem with a company providing supplemental classroom websites. It forgot to activate the anti-spam precautions. So instead of just having my students sign up (which would have been about 120 people at the time, I woke up one morning to find I had over a thousand "people" signed up. The bots had no knowledge of geography and just put together random locations on the signup, so that someone might claim to be located in Las Vegas, Nigeria or Istanbul, Finland. Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.

Given that I hardly ever see spam, it appears that the system is working well.

What measures are in place to ensure that the moderators maintain a fair and unbiased approach towards enforcing forum rules, especially considering the recent changes and potential influx of new users in the forum's better accommodations?