You know, I tried replying to your message the day I registered, and the reply just vanished when I hit "post" because my account wasn't activated. I will say, an error message would have been cool. I spent a good while writing my reply! But hey, better late than never, right?
I completely understand wanting to avoid spam. It would be pretty annoying, especially on a smaller community like this one. But, I'd also like to point out that while registering for this site, I noticed some serious flaws in the human verification step that are likely the source of the spam issues the other replies are mentioning.
The first verification step is a program similar to captcha called SOLVEmedia. This is the first problem, and possibly the biggest. See, the infamous distorted text of captchas has a purpose beyond giving people headaches. It's very easy to program a bot that can read text, and because of that, SOLVEmedia is pretty much giving away accounts to spammers like Oprah. Captcha systems aren't foolproof, no, but they're much stronger than SOLVEmedia, which is about as effective a barrier as a piece of paper. In addition, the two security questions are also useless. They never change. Just program the answers into the bot program, and boom, you're in.
It seems to me that the site is just piling verification processes on top of each other, making the registration more lengthy each time. You've gotta answer the SOLVEmedia question, answer two redundant security questions, verify your email, make a post in this topic, and wait 60-90 minutes for someone to confirm that you're a person, with no way to tell when you're finally registered. I can sign up for any other website in five minutes, but this place will take me at least an hour. Why? Other sites fix the root of the issue. Replace SOLVEmedia with an effective program. Use verification codes if you've gotta. You're making it harder for everyone!
Please understand that I don't mean any of this as an insult. I'm just trying to give tips to improve your site, and I completely understand if budget or design limitations prevent these solutions from being a reality. I mean this as nothing but friendly suggestion.
