I've replaced the image above with what someone will currently see. Clicking "real person" will be the fastest way to regain access. I even assigned a little audible notice to those e-mails so reversing a ban could be pretty quick if I'm sitting here.

Again, my apologies to the two people I've banned by simple association since implementing this policy.

So far for the month of July, this approach has denied 7,290 'hits' to this forum. Basically ~3,500, idiots expecting QJ would pay for advertising sites no one in their right mind should visit. While those requests only accounted for 0.58% of total traffic to the overall site, they would have taken CPU time, bandwidth and disk space that would multiply over time. Plus, opportunists like that just annoy the crap out of me.

These days, I'm down to banning ~2 new addresses a day and have actually seen a decrease in failed attempts and an increase in real visitor sessions over that time. I don't expect to see a day with a ratio of 35 guests to 4 members per any given 10 minute period any time soon. Even the spam I instantly began receiving when, as a stop gap measure, a new member was required to reply to an e-mail to become a member has subsided to a manageable number. The last post to the moderators forum was "Re: Million dollar idea . . . . take 3". That was a month ago.