Any system will eventually be cracked and then patched
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012...-to-its-knees/

I am wondering if VBulletin Recapture ever needs updating manually
or is all the code maintained at google and automatically updated to the latest
without intervention on our part?

I find the best way is combination:
1) use promotion system to limit permissions of newbies until a certain number of posts
2) use Glowhost Spam-O-Matic (except dont' use the username verification)

I made some changes...we'll see what happens. If they worked, my "most users online ever" amount will be way off. I looked for a place to edit that number and came up empty handed. Does anyone know where I can edit it?

I have been using reCaptcha for over 3 years now and not once have I had any problems, I have used it on joomla, kunena, wordpress and many other applications that take it.

--------------- Added [DATE]1340880394[/DATE] at [TIME]1340880394[/TIME] ---------------

You might be able to find that record using phpMyAdmin from you cPanel

I have the same issue. New user email notifications being sent to me and then when I go into admincp to search for them they don't exist. Mine is small scale compared to yours but of the dozen new user emails I received last night I can only find 4 in the DB.

[edit] What I have noticed though, in the main, is that the IP's these sign ups are coming from are COLOs. Now it could be that the ISP in question has a POP there but it seems odd that all of a sudden it's servers doing this rather than rooted PC's.