Morning Gents . I’m a moderator on a football fans forum and I’ve had exactly this problem .
we have set in place a system where all new applicant members have to have their details ratified by a Mod and then have their application activated .
The majority of new applications come from Eastern European spammers so their IP addresses give the game away straight away .
Those that are not so obvious get sent a related question by email to answer .
you’d be surprised how many Romanians think Bobby Charlton used to play for West Ham 🤣.
It means I have spend an evening once a month cleaning up the Spammer new account applications but it’s better than spending your whole life deleting and banning , which is what was happening before .
Genuine applications usually make themselves heard on the forum pretty much straight away and the obvious spammers can usually be spotted by their ridiculously Eastern European usernames .