Hmmm, maybe they found a way around them somehow. I would definitely try that mod, it should help quite a bit.

I'll return to this thread in a few weeks to let the community as a whole know how much spam it knocked out for me. I was doing some Google searches and found a post on Black Hat that pretty much shows that the software created for and sold to spammers can now completely ignore the reCaptcha and random question fields altogether.

It is not hard to make a bot learn, especially if there are limited options to learn. Any university senior that takes programming should be able to handle these very simple AI principals. Fortunately, most people could care less.

Of course that may not be what is going on here.

I always recommend people to stay away from any anti-spam mods as I believe "keywords" in these mods files attract more spammers and bots than it actually intercepts.

The best way to eliminate spammers and bots is to spend some time monitoring your site's traffic and taking note of those agents and IPs, it has worked for me for many years now and I have absolutely no problems with spam, bots every once in a while but I always end up figuring out a way to stop it.

Interesting @CheechDog, I will have to ponder that. I Like the input! :)

I am fortunate to be able to use intelligent server monitoring, so I have never needed to rely on additional late stage security scripts.

Yeeerp, I have noticed that most forums that have problems with spammers , bots , hackers have all these mods that I don't use at all yet I have 1-5 spammers register on my site if that a month, sometimes I go months without spammer accounts.

Just like the register.php mod that renames it, I really do believe these programmers are targeting they keywords and once they find they, BAM! they begin their attacks and don't stop.