Is there some super-secret hacker site that has a list of forums and where to post? (list for the spammers to use)

I've noticed that almost 100% of the spam is coming into the first forum within a forum group. In other words, if I have 5 forums, each with 5 subs under that, the spam is coming in almost always to the first listed subforum. This seems very bot-like.

Last night I switched back and forth between questions and captcha, and watched the spam roll in even right after I made the change. So, someone might have gone to my site and pre-answered all of the questions and plugged them into their "bot". The posts also come from different IPs as well.

If someone is taking the time to do all of this, I fail to see the benefit. I don't think the spam on my forums gets any traction for these people. Our site is very popular with Google, perhaps they are not looking for links, but looking for Google to index our pages and then elevate their results?

Who knows...

-Wayne

Heck, I thought it was just me...I had to shut down my new registrations...I don't have time to monitor new members...

Same here and it's driving me crazy. reCAPTCHA used to work, but it's definitely been cracked. Just switched to Q&A per vB suggestion and that hasn't help at all.

+1 ... something is happening, Re-Captcha doesn't work and based on posts above I'm nervous that a Q+A would work either :S

This is still working great for me, but i did get one spammer in the last few weeks.
Maybe the question needs to be changed every week or so. (or sooner if they figure it out sooner)

Also no they are not bots, they are people.! (or some sort of inbetween. lol)
If your site is American just make the question/answer Superbowl related. ;)

I have to use recaptcha, NoSpam and StopForumSpam to keep them out. These guys are getting desperate and just register manually now. Or they found a way around the NoSpam and recaptcha because I was getting at least 1/2 dozen a day until adding the StopForumSpam. For now it seems to be under control.

Also be sure to use at least recaptcha for your Contact Us form. I was also getting a bunch of junk that way also....

Edit..................

One more thing. Go to StopForumSpam / Register and get the API Key. That way anything new will log to their database helping to slow it down.