Relegating Spambots
 

I have an unusual question regarding spam that I'm interested in knowing how to fix. I've just installed Spam-O-Matic recently and it's working a treat, but there remains the question of what to do with all the spambot accounts still present on our servers. I suspect that if I delete these account, they will simply reappear and then I will have to ban them again... so what I want to do is have it so that "human" users are still in the Registered group, but any bots I place in the Banned section aren't recognised as registered themselves; so don't appear in the main forums' overall statistics.

I've asked VB.com and a friend who hosts another forum, but both say the technology isn't isn't in the code and directed me here. I'm not a programmer myself in PHP, so is there a plugin for this sort of thing?

Anybody?

If you follow the suggested process and use the 'ban' technique to process the bot and send the data to stopforumspam.com, then the easiest thing to do is simply delete the user acct after the ban/submit process is complete. This cleans up your user list; if the same bot tries to re-reg, s-o-m should catch it and deny reg, as it's been submitted to the database.