I currently run a board using phpbb for a pretty high profile site (US government links us, so the search engines love it). I get about 100 bogus registrations per day with phpBB. I've tried some mods and have yet to be able to effect it substantially.
How is SMF in comparison to phpBB in this sense?
Thanks.
With image verification turned on (people call it CAPTCHA, but we don't want to misuse trademarks), spam registrations are much reduced. I've replaced two phpBB boards for people where spam was taking over and it hasn't returned since. Of course, YMMV.
SMF is very good for spam protection. Auto bots will find it very card to register if image image verification is applied as stated above. SMF itself is much, much better then PHPBB, and is supported alot more too.