After reading your guide and installing a couple of other mods, I've gone from having a load of spammers still getting through to none. I've uninstalled this mod now. Great advise thanks :)

Not a problem, glad to help. :)

Can someone help me with it? I am receiving tons of very annoying spam where there is only email, not links

If the spammers are registering on your board, the best option is to block them from registering in the first place. The best way to do that is to install the tools mentioned in the post Ozzy47 linked to. I am currently blocking well over 25 per day using these mods and not one has gotten through to register since they were installed.

All of the sudden everyone is getting through even though their IP IS listed on stopforumspam. Any idea why? The logs show they "Passed StopForumSpam checks." does anyone know what the log would show it was unable to connect to stopforumspam?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=294633
Use this as well it will help

Done, but there is clearly something wrong with stopforumspam on my board. It's letting registrations go through when the IP is clearly blocked (for weeks) on stopforumspam.

It does that sometimes dont know why but i have other things in place when it does fail

Maybe stopforumspam.com was briefly down. That does happen, and there are settings in this add on for how to handle it.

I installed Spam-O-Matic a few days ago. For some reason its logging behavior has been intermittent. So far, I've only seen one log instance of "Passed StopForumSpam checks. Sent to vBulletin Registration System" - despite that several new members have joined who are not spammers/spambots. I'm unsure why it seems to miss logging most new registrations. It has, however, been blocking and logging some spambots at least. But I don't think all of its actual blocking events are appearing in the logs, either.

I wish Spam-O-Matic were more dependable/consistent as far as logging goes (so I could see what it's actually doing and not doing). Thankfully its inconsistency is not a major issue for us... because we use it in conjunction with our manual IP blocking technique, together with a few human verification questions. The combination of these things, along with an occasional manual deletion here and there, tend to keep out 100% of the spammers for us.