Alright so I'm a moderator on another forum at the minute and as part of it's growth in its early stages, we need to keep it clean of bots. Y'know, the annoying Russian viagra spam kind.

There's email verification and captcha in place yet still an irritating number are slipping through the cracks and causing the place to look messy. They're being removed and banned quickly but I've noticed that other forums don't seem to have, or have solved this problem long ago, stopping them from ever existing as anything else but guests that can't post.

I'm still learning forum stuff so I'm not particularly experienced but does anyone know of better ways to deal with them? Preferably a more permanent solution. The forum is run on vBulletin, by the way.

Cheers.

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Try doing something like this. Have everything set as admin activation only If you can). Ask them to fill out a question like we have to do when we sign up, "Who is the main character of Freelancer" (Obviously a slightly different one that relates to your forum) and if anyone gives a stupid answer, don't activate them. Slightly bit more work for your team but it should be worth it.

pretty much, a completely weird question only a human can answer will do.

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Shall be tried and tested, thank you.

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Also tell forum admin to start looking for migration path. Few years ago vBulletin was taken over by company that first had all original programmers quit, then tried to outsource coding work to India and China, and when this failed decided to hire ton of interns who gave world the disaster that is now known as "vBulletin 5 Connect".

Some of original programmers are now working on xenForo, and thats where most people that bail from vB head to.

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