tonyv

Yea, I probably don't get enough of it to notice. I've never had a single spam post on my board because I screen prospective members carefully and registration is turned off until I'm ready to admit someone. I do hate spam, but I think I hate ads more, because they're more in my face when I'm visiting some site. To me, ads are spam I can try to ignore but I can't just delete. 

I use a similar approach. My community is exclusive, and my policy for years has been that you have to ask to join. I kept registration deactivated and had an announcement visible to guests telling hopefuls to use the Contact Us link to write to me. I would then temporarily re-activate registration so the prospective member could register. Lots of users joined that way, and I knew that spammers weren't going to write to me. Since activating PBR, I've been able to re-activate registration, and almost no spammers even try to register, because they're too busy "posting" ... or at least they think they are! 😉 With this feature and the spam control rating option, it leaves very few IP addresses, user names, and email addresses for me to Google and run through WhoIs, Project Honeypot, etc. It's working out great for me. 

I tried the "post before registering" once, but switched it off after a couple of days due to the spam entries in the records. I laud its intended idea.
Personally I've taken a very different approach in the past year and it's high barrier, not low barrier
Visit my site and you get a fairly blank/minimalist home page. New member applications are only taken one day a week. All new registrations are admin approved and have to fill out a special profile field correctly first to help pass validation. Erased from Google. Erased from The Wayback Machine. "Word of mouth" beats any potential "drive-by" traffic. So a high barrier, but I believe that the future of specialist communities (that forum software encourages) is security and privacy rather than "lowest barrier/truck them all in".  Though I suspect how effective that is depends on how established your site is.
The result is no spam, anyway (and a relative haven for users, who increasingly value privacy).

Just to touch on this in case anyone else comes across the topic - this will have absolutely negligible impact on performance, backups, storage consumption and so on as well.

I am sorry you are frustrated, but your site does not in fact have "20,000 spam" posts. Your database may contain 20,000 additional temporary records, but your initial implication was your community was being overrun by spam suggesting the feature is allowing a moderation nightmare to occur and that, respectfully, is the very definition of hyperbolic. 
The feature is intended to promote engagement and reduce the initial barrier of such. I can understand if you are on shared hosting or a micro VPS with minimal resources how a bout of increased traffic and PBR submissions may present different challenges, but 20,000 - even 100,000 temporary records that will be removed if not authenticated should absolutely not pose an issue under normal circumstances. If 20,000 rows in the database is causing your site to noticeably choke, backups to be impacted and a concerning amount of storage to be consumed, I really believe there are deeper issues at play than PBR. 
We determined the maintenance period to be a reasonable amount of time between content submission and final authentication before determining the account is spam. You are welcome to suggest modifications to this in the feedback area. 
To answer your question, yes, you can shut the feature off and the cleanup of accounts and content will still occur. 
If you have any suggestions for improving the feature, you are again very welcome to post them in the feedback area. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what we can offer for your concerns at hand as again, the feature is intended to allow a path for guests to... post before registering. The posts are completely behind the scenes until they complete the registration, which requires validation and if that is not completed, the posts are removed. 

You didn't see spam posts - you looked in the database and found them. The very nature of allowing guests to post prior to registration can open up spammers to try to submit content, however unless they actually complete registration those posts are never displayed and will be appropriately pruned.
In other words, the topic here is a bit hyperbolic. 😉 There is no need to clean these posts up, the software will do it automatically.

Not mine. Facebook is not allowed on my community. 

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

Platforms that use reverse order do so to show feeds - individual items not related to each other. We do that for the topic listing and for streams.
I can’t think of any platforms that actually show conversations in reverse order. Twitter replies, iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram comments - they’re all in regular chronological order (aside from when ‘intelligent’ ordering is employed, such as Facebook showing 'relevant' messages or Reddit sorting by most-upvoted).
In fact, the only medium I can think of that uses reverse order is, ironically, good old-fashioned email (and even that depends on your client).

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

Dark mode is neither necessary nor desirable.

That's because you're a morning person.  

Real picture of @Charles at 5:00 AM watching the world wake up

I personally do not like dark mode. I actually find it harder to read.

Not mine. Facebook is not allowed on my community. 

It’s an assumption that increasing engagement decreases substance. I disagree with that assumption for my own community, but I suppose that is very dependent on each community and the type of content you have to begin with. 

I believe you're being sincere, but I just don't agree. And that's okay. Forums are primarily for certain types of discussion (e.g.paragraph style posts) just like social media is primarily for certain types of discussion (e.g. broadcast messaging). From what I've read those groups are a timeline-driven mess. I wouldn't waste my time posting on them. 

Another sound-byte cliche like "change is good." Only for people who want social media to begin with. There's nothing wrong with logging in tomorrow to read a post if that's when you have the time to do it. It's better than showing up now when you're out of time (like I am now) and half-assing it. 

Exactly. If you need social media you go to social media. If you need forums, well...that's why I'm here. It's like saying you think diesel is great. Well, it is, and it has its uses/fans. But you don't buy a gasser and say, let me turn this into a diesel, change the engine, rip out and replace the fuel system, etc. You just get a diesel if that's what you want/need. This kind of "change" is bad, impractical, at best. 

Why??? What is the big deal with these dumbass stories disappearing?!? It's nonsensical.
 
These so-called standards to which you allude are crap. If I wanted to "blog about my daily life" I would do it right on my forum. If I wanted to make disappearing blog posts, I would go to one of those idiotic social media platforms and do that.
 
I disagree.
 
No, we don't. Thankfully, forums are not childish chatsnap, nor should they be. 
 
 

There's a few barriers here.
The technical: to allow 'stories' to be posted, you'll need a fair bit of storage for the videos, you'll also need a queued system to take in raw video and transcribe it into a more friendly and compressed format which is beyond the reach for most self-hosted sites.

The strategic. No one comes here to see what I'm up to. They come here for help with their Invision Communities, or they come here to post advice for others, or to learn how to manage their communities.

Forums are discussion led platforms. The discussion is the star.
Social media are people led platforms. The person is the star.

Allowing random members to upload stories about what they're doing and so on cross-circuits the purpose of a discussion led platform.

Social media is great at being social medial. Forums are great at being forums.

Why??? What is the big deal with these dumbass stories disappearing?!? It's nonsensical.
 
These so-called standards to which you allude are crap. If I wanted to "blog about my daily life" I would do it right on my forum. If I wanted to make disappearing blog posts, I would go to one of those idiotic social media platforms and do that.
 
I disagree.
 
No, we don't. Thankfully, forums are not childish chatsnap, nor should they be.