I changed over to Simple Machines forum. Well, alpha stage, everything is possible.
The problem with Vanilla was a flood of spam which I couldn't manage to work around in any way leaving the registration (even with admin approval) open. A severe deficiency of that system I think is that no matter which way registration works, the user profiles are accessible for editing, and these edits even show in the Activity tab. Requiring e-mail verification even made matters worse (the spambots then even could get over not even showing for approval, making even more cumbersome deleting these floods of users). Based on the access logs I got to see those bots "check" the profiles and the Activity tab (probably to verify their actions are visible).
Hopefully now things will straighten out. As of now it looks like without approval no content can be added to the forum, so at least even if the flood continues, at least it is only going to bother me as admin.
If it was time to change, I also did some re-organizing, hopefully making the layout of the forum more user-friendly.
