No it does NOT, in fact it does not slow them down nowadays. I wouldnt bother with captcha or Q an A... They just blow right through it. It is a myth that Q an A stops them.

Q&A can be effective if you use questions that only your members can know and some 3rd world person that is hired to register accounts, can never answer. But that is quite difficult to do for sites that are not in a specific niche.

I certainly am very appreciative in regards to SOM and SFS.

This is a very real problem with automatic blocking. I can see how a short common word like 'fox' is not unique enough in this case.

Also, with dynamic IP address changes, some innocent user can be blacklisted because a spammer was assigned that IP a week ago...

I would like to see this mod assign values to each of the three factors, say 11 points for an email address match, 7 for an IP match and, for a username that matches the blacklist, one point for every character in the name.

The tripping point could be set initially at a total of about 10 points, but adjusted by the forum admin to suit the individual circumstances.

It would also be useful to modify the total points by the length of the Q & A response, if there is one. I find spammers often pour out all their rubbish into the Q&A response, whereas a "proper" answer is 10-20 characters only, (and never includes a URL).

Late edit- That would be difficult to do, because the spam check precedes registration, so any Q&A response would not be known when the 'spammer' decision is being made.

WS.

Totally agree.

Thanks for this.

Did anyone ever figure out the sesssion_start() errors? This is what I am receiving now when a member makes a post:

If you don't want it to examine usernames when considering to block a user or not, then you can simply change the settings to not check username.

Or, you can turn the "StopForumSpam: Remote Expiry" down to something lower than the default value.

Version 2 looks truly amazing. You have done a fabulous job!

Is it possible that version 2 might work in vb 3.8.x ?
or would you consider back porting version 2 for vb 3.8.x users?

Thanks :)

Version 2 definitely will not work in the 3.x forums. We probably will not be able to backport it because many of the functions in SOM 2.0 won't work with the old vB3.x hooks system.

Thanks for the answer. Hopefully one day I will be on vb 4 so I can use this fantastic product.