Hello,

If you are about to join Illustration Station as a new member could you please use an email address other than a gmail one when registering.

At present we are receiving between 25 and 50 membership requests per day but it is seldom that any of these are from people with a legitimate interest in illustration or related fields.

Until now, in order to give people the benefit of the doubt we have been checking the email addresses and/or user names (using a simple google search) of any requests that look legitimate.

This can be a time-consuming task.

At present around 95% of members awaiting validation are registering using a gmail address, most of whom are persons who concern themselves primarily with advertising pornography and pharmaceuticals.

As of today any requests for membership using a gmail address for registration will be deleted without any checks or verifications being run on them.

Regards,
The Admin Team