Been in Japan for two weeks and haven't had the time to do much more than the occasional reading of the forum, now trying to catch up.

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Carver View Post
Same with spammers, catch them at the door and don't let them in. That way, you don't have to go back after the fact and delete 15,000 (!!!) bogus accounts.
The loads of spam accounts we had to delete was due to old software, before the Q&A human verification was added to vBulletin.
I think we have had 2-3 spammers since then, no bots. And we probably had one hacker (the account was deleted before I had a chance to look into it) but this I think was due to a recent exploit of vBulletin that now should have been handled (if I hadn't been away we probably wouldn't have got that one in either).

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Carver View Post
This is one of the reasons I recommend StopForumSpam and their vBulletin add-on. It provides one additional layer to your registration process and helps keeps out the bots, both human and non-human type.
Thanks for the tip, will look into that.

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Carver View Post
Two other suggestions: A lot of forums will isolate new members into a "newbie" usergroup that has very limited privileges (like no signature) and all posts up to a certain number must be moderated. In other words, the posts must be approved by a member of the moderation staff. Once the magic number is reached, they are promoted to another more senior usergroup (like "Member") and their posts will no longer be moderated.

On that similar note, I have an add-on that I use that restricts members with less than XX number of posts from posting any sort of a link. Yes, sometimes they will spoof the URL (like spelling out DOT COM), but those you just whack for breaking the rules and trying to circumvent your restrictions.
I have been considering to do something similar, but we haven't gotten to that yet. Had a lot of other things to handle first with the upgrade and cleaning out old trash. We will look into this further when time allows.

/Anders