I am tron on this. ...i just mark folks as spam and move on...

Can we double that amount?

Just reading the OP for this thread.

Think about this.

Today a newbie to the world of pinball gets his first machine. Now at home excited, plugs it in and nothing!!
A bit of Googling, finds Pinside - But has to wait weeks to post and get help.

What would you do?
Answers
1/ Wait weeks for good help from Pinside.
2/ Find another site and forget Pinside.
3/ Gee, I don’t know.

Excellent idea. Or until xx days - weeks.
While I understand not being able to post could be counter-productive, this limitation should not.

I've mentioned this before, but it's easy.

1) All posts get posted... but only mods see posts from new users.
2) Mods have a link in their control panel that opens threads and posts posted by new users
3) When reading the threads/posts, they can easily discern spam from legit posts. They press one of two buttons: approve/reject. Doing so either puts the user into the posting group permanently, or it delays them being added. This gives Robin a chance to ban spammers.

vBulletin (a form of BBS software) can do this very thing, and it would be relatively easy to implement here I'm guessing (speaking as a software engineer myself).

Are they eligible for some kind of pension?

Thats a good point. Its pretty obvious when someone is posting to cause issues. More surprising to me are the one or two guys that will respond and spar with them. Like they say, it takes two to have an argument and they would stop posting if we stopped playing.

Agreed, there are a lot of possible solutions. Waiting a week should not be one of them, but (My point in my post).

One thing I often read on newbie posts is “thanks for the fast reply”, which is really cool and a credit to Pinside and its people.