Jonathan - 5:57 pm on Dec 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

The captchas that are effective against bots are too difficult to read. Email confirmation reduces legitimate registrations.

Asking a simple question works for us. Obviously, that won't stop human spam registrants.

An option that can be used in conjunction with the "registration spam question" is to monitor new members' posts for certain keywords, and assign them spam-scores accordingly. So, for example, "iphone" in the title of a new post would garner 8 points. A link in the body of a post: 1 point. 10 points and it's considered a spam post, at which point the post is not placed on the forum until it's manually approved by a moderator. The vBulletin version of this is called "Spambuster".

So instead of <input type="text" name="email"> its now: <input type="text" name="fdf3524757jgtcgs5uj68658cxgf"> and the name changes everytime the page loads. The field names are stored in the Session.

Extremely clever.