I know that a lot of people join up to post a link they found interesting or post a picture of their bike and are frustrated. OTOH, we get a lot of drive-by members that just want to use the forum once and then leave. I am not sure we should accommodate the latter group at the expense of keeping out spammers, who are at an all-time low here. Given the reduction of moderator workload from the old days when we sometimes banned over 100 spammers per hour, I am somewhat unapologetic about these policies. And I know that nobody likes spam.