New Admin Require Help in Various Task (need guidence)

[Jaffery]

Hello,

I am new to vb (have experience with various other forum software). Here I am reading a lot, learning things but still I guess I think it will be great if I ask my problem one by one.

I have converted from smf to vb4, have 150+ forums and 14000+ member. Currently registration is disabled due to spam issue... and also forum posting is disabled due to permission issue. I have done lots of reading around and solved many issues but still there are confusion about few ...

Kindly guide me for following :

1. I want new members not to have Signature as well PM facility, so what I did, I have created a new "UserGroup" and also added Promotion.
It goes as follow :
Registered user with less than 26 posts should be promoted to new custom group which not allowed to use sig and send PM and also their posts are moderated. But when I run "Promotion" cron from "Sheduled task.. no users are being added to new custom group which I have created.

Also, how do I make sure that newly registered members are also part of that group.

2. Which is the best combination of spam fighting process which worked for you as when I enable registration, there are lots of bot registrations. I tried enabling "Custom Required Field", Added QnA under "human verification" but it doesn't help. There are so many mods etc. for spam fighting here but I need to know which one actually works ?

3. I have created few section in CMS, have created a USERGROUP who has permission to post articles in CMS, Went to "vbulletin CMS --> Permissions ", there granted write permission to that group including sub section but still when I log in as "user" of that group, I can't see link to create article... However, I can see it as Admin.

4. I have 150+ forums, what is best way to create a new usergroup and make sure that it has same permission in all boards except few like "MOD board" etcs.. There are too much settings about "permission" .. and I am confused there...