I'm also seriously worried about all those jolly "hi!" messages in the Introduce Yourself section, where one person says he's from Lalaland, and many give the vaguest of reasons why they are interested in joining a literary forum, and rather odd jobs, such as an "officer from Luxembourg" although not stating whether he is working for the airforce, navy, or army (or simply means "civil servant"). Several entries smack of spam, but it would be a pity to drive people away just because they cannot express themselves very well in the language of this forum, English. And people who have a lot of numbers in their sobriquet, or some unpronouncable thing with y, q, x, z and lacking other vowels, also smack of spam.
Luckily, Stewart has begun to challenge such people. All you have to do is ask them a couple of innocuous questions about their interests in literature, and they fall silent.
I think the introductions should be just that. The people should at least say which country they are from and which specific areas of literature interest them. This would not breach the habit of anonymity that has been built up here (although I don't really know why) but would give the rest of us some idea what types of people are joining.
You might think me rude in not welcoming everyone on the introductions thread, but I feel I would sometimes be welcoming a chimera, spammer, or, to use a sophisticated term borrowed from criticism, pain in the arse who feels it his duty to destroy and disrupt what others build up.
One thing I've noticed that also smacks of spam is when one of these suspicious types posts his gobbledegook, the number of non-registered people shoots up to about 10 for that thread, when normally only about two people would be looking at the same time.