[Jolten]

My best promotion system has been with the V3arcade. I added the arcade initially only for my members as a diversion. I don't run a gaming site and I generally don't have a lot of members that are into gaming. The arcade was simply a "while you're here, kill 2 minutes" thing. When I initially installed it I started to get flooded with members (usually younger than my member base) that simply sat in the arcade all day. Call me a grouchy old man, but I didn't install the arcade so people can sit and use bandwidth all day long and ignore the basic purpose of the site.

So I added a promotion system, 10 posts to play. Similar to your promotion system. What I found then was I still had the issue with registrations only to play games, then on top of that the issue of members spamming forums for access.

I felt much like you seem to be feeling.

Here's what I did.

I edited every template necessary (and forum permissions) and added a conditional based on usergroupid. The conditional hides the arcade completely from guests and from new members until the user has been promoted to the usergroupid with access. I set a forum for the arcade to the same permissions based on usergroupid. Essentially, guest sand new members don't even know the arcade is installed until they've been around a while.

Since instituting this, the arcade has become just as I wanted it to be initially -- a mere diversion. My forums aren't getting spammed and I'm not getting random registrations just to play games.

I'm not certain this will help you but I thought I'd share.