massive amount of spam on vBulletin install
 

I run a website (www.ihercules.net) and we have a separate vBulletin forum (ihercules.net/forum).

We are running 3.7.4 PL1 and the only add-ons we have are GAB 2.0.2, GARS 2.1.8, Geek Auto-Linker 6.0.8, Geek Gazette 1.0, vBulletin Blog 1.0.5 and the Enhanced Image Captcha 2.2b.

Within the last two months we've seen a large amount of spam users registering on the site. Originally they were able to post spam content to the forum. Now we just get a large amount of users signing up. We have the forum set to require approval for all new registrations, but somehow this doesn't stop the users from becoming registered. We also have a smaller amount of spam users in the queue to be approved.

What can I do to stop this? It's frustrating and enhancing the captcha hasn't worked? I think the problem might be with the vBulletin installation itself, because somehow the spam users are able to bypass the approval queue and directly join the forum.

I'm very new to vBulletin but I have some PHP/HTML programming experience. Any ideas and assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have email verification turned ON.

Enable question/answers on registration, it works best.

reCAPTCHA works well too. However, if the spammers are human assisted (i.e. have a human complete the CAPTCHA), then you can't really spoil them.

I turned Human Verification on, as that was off. Email verification was always on, but that didn't seem to do anything to stop it. So far, so good.

The funny thing is that we had it set to all new users needed to get approval, however, some of the spam users were able to get right in without an administrator approving them. That's what made me think that there was a leak in the code somewhere.