Hi

http://www.yabbforum.com/community/YaBB.pl?num=1321729072

Have you installed any of the Anti-Spam mods??? 

Good Luck

seems that boardmod is down now.

there's a note about them moving to a new, faster host/server.

@ Bill

I think you might need to qualify that last comment with "in my experience" and perhaps "on my boards" and maybe "up to this point".  + "This only applies to auto-registering bots"

I say that because Xrumer and its kin are constantly evolving and because properly created Anti-Spam questions can defeat hu-bots (human spammers), where CAPTCHA fixes have to be revealed.

To be righteous - I'll qualify this by saying "That's my opinion, and not that of YaBB". 

Have a good day -

JonB wrote on Feb 8^th, 2012 at 10:42am:

Thanks Jon! Yes, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of human spammers, but as it's evident in our forum, so far at least, 100% of the spam registrations have obviously been automated bots. I figure that any human spammer getting through can be easily stopped thanks to admin approval, and I'm not expecting too many of them, if any.

I'm guessing, too, that human spammers can easily figure out even the most clever questions that are chosen to stop them if an admin was to use the anti-spam questions mod.

What it will come down to with any admin is to implement what works best for them, and use what's most effective.

Keep in mind, too, that people like you and Dandello are much more intelligent, and experienced in terms of computer knowledge, so installing bots can be like child's play for you.

For us slower-minded folks, i.e., the relatively inexperienced, we need the easiest, and less complicated solutions to keep our forums running. For that matter, even the installation of YaBB takes a learning curve, so many if not most people are unable to do what you'd surely consider to be an easy installation.

I operate a public access board with admin approval for registrations, and that serves us perfectly fine. This is with Guest Post off, and Broadcast Message to Admin disabled. However, without some kind of spam control, this does not make a forum relatively immune from spammers; not even close! Or more accurately, spammers still try to register by the hundreds each day.

In fact, with our forum before I implemented the captcha change, we had anywhere from 600-800 attempted registrations a day; easy enough throughout the day to delete them, and it only took a few short minutes each time, but it was still a pain in the neck.

After the captcha change, only legitimate registrations have gotten through, and been processed.

Interestingly, for whatever reasons, no version of Xrumer seems to have figured out the captcha change we made; not yet anyway. But even if or when they do, it's easy enough to make another captcha change to thwart them.

I like your idea for YaBB to have some kind of a 'Spammer Delete' control in the Admin Center that does exactly what it says!