Pros and Cons: Requiring Separate Login for Forum?

[eluser]Vik[/eluser]
I may want my site to have a forum where people can discuss the site. At first glance, it seems like the right thing to do, is to find a way so that the same username/password works on the main site, and on the forum as well.

OTOH, the biggest problem with forums, is spam. I've got a forum where people discuss general blogging subjects unrelated to any particular CMS (forum4bloggers.com), and it was almost destroyed by spammers, even though only registered users can post, and the registration system uses captcha. It got so inundated with spam that I had to shut it down for a while. I only got it working again by requiring every new registrant, to email me personally, requesting registration approval.

So there need to be anti-spam measures on a forum, that don't need to be on my main site. And of course, there's also the hassle of integrating the login for the site, with the login for the forum.

Would it be a big mistake to require users to have a username/password on the forum, that is different from the username/password they have on the main site?

Thanks in advance to all for any opinions/thoughts/info.

[eluser]llbbl[/eluser]
Yes it would be a big mistake.

You should have a captcha and valid email address at the very least. You can also add in hidden fields into the registration form to catch bots. Banning all yahoo, aim and hotmail emails can help also.

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
Akismet has an API you can use to run text through to determine whether it is spam or not. In addition, add in some intelligent spam filtering (look for a large number of links, etc).

[eluser]Vik[/eluser]
[quote author="llbbl" date="1191651444"]Yes it would be a big mistake. [/quote]

Can you discuss your thoughts on the reason for this?

[eluser]llbbl[/eluser]
[quote author="Vik" date="1191658074"][quote author="llbbl" date="1191651444"]Yes it would be a big mistake. [/quote]

Can you discuss your thoughts on the reason for this?[/quote]

If its a community based site you need to have a unified user administration system, otherwise it makes your site look unprofessional and or not to be taken seriously.

If its your blog or whatever where there is a limited amount of users that publish content in one section and you have an active forums for some reason, than yea I could see separate login system.

[eluser]Vik[/eluser]
Good points. Thanks for the input.

[eluser]RaZoR LeGaCy[/eluser]
What forum will you be incorporating within codeignitor?

[eluser]llbbl[/eluser]
I like using PunBB for most projects.

[eluser]RaZoR LeGaCy[/eluser]
can you post some links to your current forums that use this forum and codeignitor

Thanx

[eluser]llbbl[/eluser]
Nope sorry. I haven't used it with CodeIgniter yet. I have used it with wordpress before because I didn't like bbpress all that much. PunBB uses a smarty templating system, so it is really easy to integrate into an existing site design.

I know one major site that uses it.

Freshbooks.

http://forum.freshbooks.com/