1:
The not being able to create an account yourself, is traveling traffic away. Now I'm pretty sure why this is so, but here is a suggestion that could help:

Allow people to make accounts, but, make it so that account has to be verified by the admin. This way, you can stop spambots and whatnot. You can also add a spambot resistant thingy to the registration. Writing the numbers down from the images (or letters), or you can ask it to spell something very specific like "doDAY i GOT home to WoRk." it works

2:
Allow people to edit their posts. Its a bit of a mess otherwise...

3:
Spoiler tag! Its great! It can make posts, especially Conlang threads, incredibly neat and organized. You can disable it through signatures as well.

4:
center coding and more BBcodes! It will help! :3

And 5!

If 1 isn't liked or if you don't want to do it, you could do this:

Make a better announcement about contacting the admin for an account. For example, you could recite this message when someone presses the "REGISTER" button, or make it a forum announcement above the forum.

that is excactly what I think! hopefully Simon will one day agree

It would seriously help the site. If its problems with spam and bots, you have set up questions and ask a history question. Its what I did, an easy question by the way, and haven't had a single bot since.

I hope something is done. This site deserves a lot more activity

@Admin:

If you would like to know how to enable editing, I put a tutorial together:

First you need to decide who will be allowed to edit their posts. You can set this up so new members must have a "certain" amount of posts to be able to edit, or you can set it up to allow everyone or registered (not newly registered) members can freely edit. Once you have decided on that, go to you Admin Control Center/Panel, log in and then go to the Fourth Tab called "USERS AND GROUPS". Within this, to the left sidebar, you should find "Groups’ forum permissions". Click it and look to the right side again. You should see this:

Click me

Select "Registered Members" from the dropdown list (you will need to do this for each group you want to be able to edit posts) and then hit the "SUBMIT" button. Now you should be looking at a page like this:

Click me

Select "ALL FORUMS" (or check the ones you want people to be able to edit their posts in) and then click the "SUBMIT" button. Now you will be presented with a list of all the forum and categories to the forum. You will need to go into "ADVANCED PERMISSIONS" and then scroll to the bottom page. Here you'll find this little box:

Click me

Go through the tabs and select what you want the members to be able to do. Once you enable editing posts and threads, click the "APPLY PERMISSIONS" button. And bam! Done with permissions to allow editing (and whatever else you want)

And then the last thing to do for POSTING EDITING, is click POSTING tab and click ""POST SETTINGS". Which in here, you should see this:

http://i54.tinypic.com/ezh2j7.jpg

Allow editing always


*For example, you have editing allowed for this section of the forum, but not for long. *

======================================================================

I also made one for BBCodes (center etc etc :>):

To add BBCode, the center code for example, click the third Tab in the Admin Control Panel called "POSTING". To the left, the very first it lists, you'll see "BBCode". To the right, all of the current BBCode installed. To make a new BBCode, click "" and then paste all the needed code work. Here is the code for Center codes.

Click me

Just type what you see in the picture above in the boxes I did. And if you want Spoiler tags, which could greatly help the site, here ya go:

Put this in USAGE, FIRST BOX:


Put this in SECOND BOX, CALLED HTML PLACEMENT:


And there ya go xD

Also, to stop spam, just to this:

Go into Admin Control Panel and on first TAB, click the "User registration settings". With in here, if you allow users to register freely. After that, on the same FIRST TAB, click "Spambot countermeasures"

In here you can set up questions, passwords (easy for humans). Scroll to the bottom and make a question and provide an answer. For example, this is what I have my forum set to upon registration.

Question:
Who first said that "an aspirin a day" could help prevent heart attacks?

Answer:
Provide answer.

In order to allow and make questions, you must select "Q&As" from the dropdownlist in "Available plugins"



Hope that helps!

Also, if you trust someone who is willing, you should add at least 1 or 2 moderators that can delete spam topics.

(I hope I get forgiven for reviving this thread.)
Not only to delete spam topics, but also to notify and ban users who have violated certain rules of conduct. In my experience, forums that work that way tend to have much higher quality discussion.
By the way, editing is enabled, but only for about an hour after you make the post. This isn't such a good idea, IMHO. Please, somebody, extend the time limit or set it to infinity. There are several forums out there where people post threads that state explicitly that they will edit the post with new information every once in a while (for example, lists of links to stuff). You can't do that on Omniglot. If you want to do that kind of thing over here, it needs to be done in several posts, and that's really inconvenient.

Say, has anyone been to the General Chat forum lately? It's absolutely filled with incoherent ads. I'm not really sure what one should do about that -- maybe ban anyone with certain word choices or who only posts under General Chat? I know it says somewhere that you can only have a certain number of URLs in your signatures; maybe add a similar rule for posts? Or maybe not allow anything that looks like HTML tags with angle brackets?
I know that if you decided to ban on the basis of word choices, some good things to start off with would be anything about "Ugg boots", "sex" or "Viagra".

Yes, and of course anything about pornography. There's way, way too much of that kind of reference on here. I don't think there's a smiley to express how much I hate these ads. Please, somebody, do something about them! The General Chat forum used to be a nice place to visit before it got full of these incoherent, incomprehensible, obnoxious spam thingies that are probably posted by some kind of robot. Why? Why is this happening? Can't you see your robot blockers aren't getting rid of these spammers?! No offense, of course, but something should really be done or it will be really hard to sort through all the spam to get to the actual content.