Its nice to see 3 important hacks combined.
Is there any chance to also get:
- minimal registration speed check
- hidden registration fields (that only bots can see)

That would make this complete.

Its possible.

I like the sound of the first one but am not sure how useful the second one would be since the spammers that code the bots are people, and they generally are going to want to see the fields that they are trying to defeat when they program their bots.

If a bot doesn't know what to put in a field, it will be bank, the same as a human who can't see the field. This might also cause accessibility problems for some people who rely on bots like screen-readers to do things for them.

Maybe I missed the concept of the second idea though.

Many vb boards have mandatory custom profile fields. Spam bots need to fill these in to register. Every board has different custom fields, so spammers have little chance to anticipate. It would be easy to add invisible fields with standard names. If you add a hidden profile field named 'Interests' then chances are that a bot will recognize this and fill it in. There used to be a addon that did this, but cant find it ATM.

Two other suggestion that would make this anti-spam suite complete are:

• Bad behaviour: http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/d.../how-it-works/
• Option to disallow disposable email domains from registration. There is a list here. People can easily add the list to the email ban list, but it would be far more useful to have a centrally updated list. (doesnt need to be updated more than once every few months) And most admins do not realize the problems that disposable email addresses pose.

BTW: Many boards are getting a lot of profile spam these days. Does this addon deal with that or is that something that needs an additional solution?

Thanks for the suggestions, it would be good to have a central DB of disable emails, I agree.

This does not deal with profile spam, or blog spam at the moment. Those are planned for a later release. The primary purpose is to block registrations of known-spammers, then moderate the ones that are able to sneak past so that they never get as far as being able to spam in the first place.

Does that mean that you aim to add cookie based multiple account detection for banned accounts?

This addon works very well: Multiple Account Detection & Prevention
It seems a perfect combination with your addon. (as is vmail)

Probably not. Only people use cookies and spammers are rarely people. The other thing is people can delete cookies.

What I meant was that if they get past the blacklist checks then in the current version if they do anything "spammy" they will generally be caught by auto-moderation and moderated.

In version 2 all new members are placed in a new usergroup which has (configurable) limited permissions. If they make it past X posts they will graduate to the standard registered users group. If they do anything spammy in either group they will be moderated, until they are no longer checked for automatic moderation based on your postcount settings.

Your spammer would have to be a very persistent and bored person to make it to the registered users group and if they are that much of a pain in the butt then banning their IP from your server is always an option. I think it would be a rare day.

I do use a usergroup for new users, which they can only get out of if they receive 5 reputation points. That does work like a charm. Post count is something that spam bots seem to recognize, as they just start posting like crazy to get more than X posts. That caused me to put it the post count at 50. My staff catches them well before they can make that, as they are there around the clock.

I would expect that same about cookies, but I actually catch a very substantial number of spammers trough cookie. Happens every day.

Even after all of the above (including all of my suggestions and multiple account detection) we still get spammers, that try to circumvent the links block, in various creative ways. All these measures did get rid of 99% of all spam though, so its vital functionality for me.

To get an idea: I get 7.000 registrations attempts per month, of which 4.000 are successful and have confirmed their email and passed all spam checks. I have 3.000 banned members.

a suggestion for spammers who already are a memebe on the board, how do you preven them, you know they dont only spam by posting thread but they also spam all members on pm with the llinks so how can this mod prevent further spam

There is not much you can do about existing spammers with this mod. This mod prevents them from getting on the boards in the first place. You should probably install it now to prevent more bad guys from signing up, then start working on your existing spammers using alternative means.

here is one.

I have people / spammers registering on my forum...but afterwood disappear
into nothingness, no trace of the members name or anything...

this is what i find in spam matic log:

Venusian Arts PUA Spam-O-Matic Tagged ip - 98.64.196.143 - Spammer Found but allowed

It says it has identified the spammer, but has allowed the spammer.

So i can not find any record of the member in non-validated to registered to banned,
the member record is just no where to be found....

on another signup attempt, I get this one:

No Username Submitted Spam-O-Matic Tagged email - (email) Spammer Found but allowed.

Whats going on?