Thanks for the feedback everyone.
JohnRoss, I understand exactly what you are saying, however....
Since yesterday I have had the following registrations:
Islamabad 13
China 10
India 14
UK 3
From my experience running the forums so far I can probably guarantee you that bar the UK registrations all the others are spammers, or, designers that are prepared to work for next to nothing.
Obviously my aim as well as creating a friendly community for you all to discuss design related issues is to promote
UK designers, if the users above are going to spam the forum or offer design work for peanuts then this is going to cause problems.
CAPTCHA doesn't work as most of these users are real people sat at a PC somewhere getting paid to spam forums. For the past 2 months since doing this I have not had 1 spam post to deal with and I can only put this down to what I have done with regards to the IP's.
With regards to UK designers based around the globe, I agree totally that they should be able to join the forums but how do I do implement this? Obviously if they have a foreign IP but register with a UK e-mail/domain then they are approved without question, but, if they are signing up with a gmail account and an IP based in the US what can I do?
There are already many design forums that are open to the rest of the world and to be honest I did not enjoy frequenting them, silly quotes for design work, poor english, discussion on issues that were to do with other countries that were of no interest to me, spam!.....I thought our USP could be that this is a UK only forum, something different from what is already out there.
As mentioned above, this is your forum so whatever the members choose I am happy to go with, so let's see how the poll turns out in a couple of months.
Many thanks
Damon