Tons of spam
 

I'm not sure why but with the upgrade of my forum to 4.0 I have received TONS of spam. I'm talking about 10+ robot registrations per day with over 15+ spam threads per day, ranging in different categories and post styles, some the same, some different.

I have all users having to activate their account by email, type in the image verification, etc. and have the mod VBStopForumSpam which blocks the ip of known spammers through their system..

I don't know why I get so much spam robots and such but is there any way to stop it?
In 3.8.x I used to have mods to help this which worked such as advanced captcha, advanced image verification, etc. which none of seem to be alive for 4.0... any help?

Did you try using reCAPTCHA?

I found it gave me the best results.

Is there one for 4.0..?

--> Admin control panel
--> Settings
--> Human Verification Manager
--> reCAPTCHA

When I had vB3, I used the NoSpam! mod using the Q/A feature...it *really* cut the spam down to almost nothing. The reCAPTCHA option never worked well enough in my forum.

I found that NoSpam! is not compatible with vB4, but I saw that vB4 actually has that Q/A feature integrated now. My board is shut down now while I work on some things but I will report back on the results once I reopen it.

The key is to make the questions hard enough to throw off the bots (and change them regularly as well). "What color is the sky? blue" is too easy. Maybe ask a question that pertains to your forum's subject area?

Just a thought...

Yes, for god's sake drop all that now-broken captcha stuff and use a simple Q&A.