How do you handle memberships?

Curious. Do you use "promo"? Do you set promo to FULL access, allowing people to experience all the site has to offer? 

My concern with this is that non-serious people will sign up and spam or abuse the system. post ads, etc. then bail. Does that matter? Does that happen? Should I just disable promo? have standard, paid, and non-member? Is that easier? I want what's going to be easiest (for me) :P

If i wanted to entice folks to join with "free memberships for life" for first few months (or first 100 to join).....how would i do that correctly? deactivate everything except my paid level, set to "0" (life-time), and leave "price" empty? Then when I want to switch back.....activate other levels, add price, etc. and......it won't effect the previous members?? Is that correct?

Hope that makes sense. Thx

Promotional should be used if you have an open sign up site.  There are spam farms in China where people do nothing all day but visit sites to leave spam; since these are humans, they get in where spam bots are blocked.  What they want to do is to sign up, and then start posting spam all over the place.  The promotional level stops them from being able to do this.  Confirmation emails don't stop them since they will use an email addy that they can check and reply to.

It all depends on who your after. If you are looking for high traffic and to sign every person that clicks through, spam will always be an issue and you will need to become an expert in it to properly manage the problem.

If your site is like mine, restricted to a specific interest or hobby (mine is the towing and recovery industry), then management is easy. I manually approve every member. I set my standard membership like a restricted guest then upgrade or delete them once I've checked out their login details. I also know most of them personally or at least I know what company they represent. My site has less than 700 members but almost all of those members visit the site at least 3 times a month and many more are there every day and they have all been members for years.

There are many ways to control spam and all of those ideas can be found within these walls. You can block by countries, known spammer IP addresses, you can even block (with modifications) specific domain names. I hate captcha (because I think it's easily defeated) but one sure way to keep the spammers out, even the Chinese is to use a human question during the login process that only your users can answer. My question is 'What's this site about?'  The bots can't figure it out and unless the Chinaman that's hacking me speaks English, he can't answer it either.

A good place to start - search this term here. I still think it's the best spam post on the site. === 'spam spam spam idea'

I hate recaptcha, any captcha because they are impossible to read and yes, they have been broken.  I much prefer to use a turning test; asking a question; properly asked, they can be very effective and is what I use on other applications.

@SkyForum:  How did you implement a turning test for Dolphin?

Kim,

There is wisdom in all those posts.  I've tried so many options but the safest way to me is the restrictions path.  If you use the promotional path get ready to have a full time person ready to delete.  I have over 1,400,000 pages listed with Google.  The only way I was able to stop the onslaught of China was to make it frustrating for them.  IOW register but to what end?  You can do nothing once you get here!  They then were sending me responding e-mails to properties which ALL come to me!  Daunting at best but I guess they track it some how because they stopped after a week of a blizzard of emails.  My newest site will cost money to use so membership levels will work perfect.  The SITE or message must be strong enough to draw them into the purchase.  I also have seen a free post for a simple math problem to deal with the bots.  I think AntonLV posted that but not sure if it needs an update to 7.1. Also I have spent years dealing with speed now at 90-95 on 7.0.9 if you restrict large amounts of IPS good luck on the speed to do so.  HostGator has exceptional 3rd tear handlers who track anything if you simply ask and they said that was dragging the site way down once removed BOOM speed came right back. China sucks and cloudflare is the only serious effort with project honeypot that I have seen to deal with those pests!!!  Honeypot is something Dolphin needs to look at on a grand scale!  The way they catalog each IP is stimulating and quite well done.  Cloudflare however inconsistiancy of signal gave me headaches... 

I just put my site on Googles page speed with CDN.  I will see how they deal with this if they do at all.  My pages have jumped 9 points in a day once on that network...