Why is membership required to post here?

[Nilzor]

Hi, I joined this group today because I have a question regarding TDD
that I'll post later, but the fact that I had to apply for membership
to this group kindof put me off. I'm pretty new to Google Groups
altogether, so I don't know if this is common, but I see for instance
the group on Behaviour Driven Development is open for all to post in.
My point is: for a community to be thriving, isn't it a good practice
to be open and welcoming for all possible new contributers? I can see
from the post frequency in this group that the activity isn't all
that. Am I pointing out a possible reason here?

Btw, do you guys know of other active forums where TDD is discussed?
Or maybe some forum on agile development in general?

PS: I got my membership approved pretty fast, so props for that.

[Nick Parker]

Nilzor,

The moderation is not meant to put off posting, but is simply a
mechanism to keep the forums clean of spam posting which we do
receive. Hopefully this doesn't dissuade you from posting here in the
future. There is also an active TDD mailing list on the Yahoo.

Nick Parker