Bot Prevention
 

I've gotten a lot of annoying bots sign up to my forum. To prevent them from posting, I simply made addition usergroups and took away the posting ability for the newly registered users.

I would like to allow new users to post without having to edit them.

I looked in the vbulletin options and found 'Human Verification Options' and 'User Registering Options'.

This is all I found that I thought would be what I was looking for:

"Username Regular Expression
You may require the username to match a regular expression (PCRE). The admin help provides some examples that may be useful. To disable this function leave the option blank."

I typed something in and tried to make a new account. I didn't see any command to type in what I had typed. However, I did not complete the registration, so maybe that was it?

Thanks for your help.

Unless you know what a Regular Expression is and how to write them, I would not mess with that field. (And I don't think it's gonna help stop bots.) Definitely use some sort of verification. Take a look in the articles forums or search this forum for other threads on spam and the best ways to go about stopping it.