Thanks for the accolades guys - but the truth is, I and your other Admins were tired of the spam, and "attitude" issues on other forums. We just believed that a true user driven site would work much better. It does require a fully manual approval process, and the applicant's information must pass thru 3 international databases and come out as "clean" - meaning no spam generation, or history of their I.P. addresses/e-mail etc have been used for generating "junk" or associated in any way with data mining or hacking.
This is an extra pain for new members and - that means we will not grow as fast as some sites.
But we want to focus on building this place, not on number of members but on quality of posts. Input of data that is useful, great recipes and advice.
And - a lot of humor along the way to entertain, and keep us from taking things too seriously