Preventing Bot registration

[coreno]

My community (www.neobahumut.com/boards) has been around for a few years, but we're a very small community.

However, at some point in the past (before SMF), bots managed to find our website, and started using it for spamming/advertising. I fixed it temporarily with my own homemade captcha image, but eventually they were able to get around it.

Jump to more recently, with SMF, I installed and enabled the reCAPTCHA mod, so users have to pass a captcha image, but bots are getting around that. I very recently turned on email verification, and of course they're getting around that too. I can get several bots per day posting. I do range bans on IPs when I can (when they're say from china or russia).

I don't get very many legit registrations (though I hope for that to go up in the not-too-distant future), but those that are I would like to be painless as possible. I COULD require admin approval of all accounts, but that is a bit tedious, and I'd be afraid of actually deleting legitimate accounts in the middle of a mass of spam-bot accounts.

Are there any additional modifications out there that would complicate the registration process for bots?

I would like to limit new human users as little as possible, to avoid turning away what little real new members that we may get.

So far I feel my options are:
-IP Block all of Russia and China (I don't really expect legit users from there)
-Manually approve all accounts
-Implement some complex multi-step verification process trying to confuse bots.

[Cassiel]

reCAPTCHA isn't the only Anti-Spam mod that SMF has. I mean they have a whole section on Spam Prevention and most of the mods in the Registration and Signup section deal with keeping unwanted people out. Try some out and see what works.

Spammers and Bots are a thing that every forum owner has to deal with. You just got to be prepared for when it happens. For example, i put some staff members on my site just to deal with Spammers. Just got to deal with it the best you can, and find your own way to deal. Maybe that way can help you.

Also, i remember reading an article about a year ago that talked about how some spam bots are actually humans. And their main job is to just get past CAPTCHAs, and they get paid for it. So virtually nothing can get past these guys before they aren't bots at all. But like i said you just got to deal with it the best you can. With every anti-spam prevention method out there spammers will try to find a way around it.

Best of luck to you and your site.