No they are not doing it in PM's either. My forum members immediately report any spam PM's and I am also very aware of what is generally going on on my forum.

We occasionally do get reports of spam PM's but it is never more than a handful out of the tens of thousands of PM's sent every year.

Secondly, verifying a e-mail doesn't prove anything about the identity of a person. E-mail services don't verify the identity of any person creating an E-mail. The E-mail providers are running a business, they are not a government or international institution. They don't have any people who verify any documents or background of the person creating the email ID. Anyone can make a fake e-mail ID in minutes.

E-mail verification is useful for verifying the e-mail the member has submitted to you exists and occasionally it can help in wearing down trolls who keep re-registering very rapidly. But overall it has a negative effect on member registration and participation.

If you are not paranoid about verifying the existence of your members e-mail addresses then don't use this feature.

It has nothing to do with being paranoid. It is just good common sense.

Very interesting points here, I was wonder about these things myself. How about limiting just to face book registrations, it almost seem everybody is on facebook, ok you do get spammers on facebook but this kills the bots registration for now. I don?t know if vb will allows only facebook users to join, but I think it would be a cool mod to be made plus you don't need to worry about the email Verification ,facebook took care of that for you ;)

Yes he will still be able to come back. Also banning e-mail addresses is quite useless for fighting trolls.

Also please stop making your posts completely in bold. Use bold only to highlight certain text which you want to stand out.

This might seem like a shameless plug, but, if you find out their user agent (in who's online) and use this mod https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=264932 you can stop them getting in :)

If you do not verify email addresses, then your site will send out email to non existent email addresses. As a result email providers will blacklist your site as a spammer. In time many of the major email providers will refuse your email.