What's also interesting, let's agree we come up with a "method" that ensures the registrant is human - what's to stop them from turning the account over to a bot? Agreed, it's a lot of trouble, but... I'm not that interested in trying to keep the bots out, I feel it creates too unfriendly an environment for real people. My site is not geared toward web savvy folks, they have a hard enough time with a bare bones registration system. I removed the Captcha in favor for a simple what is 2 plus 2 question. If a bot gets in, I remove it. My site is small (less than 3,000 users), and the only real trouble I've had is with what appear to have been real users who registered and spammed once.<

I too require registration to post, and they are forced to verify their email account. The site gets many visits (about 20,000 page views a day - pretty good for my content), but still very few (almost no) spammers.<