Membership is going through the roof... Not traffic related though?
 

So I finally updated my forum to Vbulletin 4.1.2 on Friday and since then, I have found my forum membership growing at an incredible rate...

140 new members in 3 days... Now while I would love to think that Vbulletin 4.0 is a miracle worker and that my website is just that hot of an item... but I know its not... Thats more than 10% of my forum population

Any ideas what the crazy increase in members is?

My guess is its Spam that is registering but not able to post?

Why are you guessing? You should know by now. Dealing with a bunch of fake users in the future won't be easier than staying on top of it right now.

With only two posts I was about to answer this as a newbie question and tell you not to use captcha, but if you've actually been running a forum a while I guess you already know that. Have you tried changing your q&a?

Im actually running Q&A I have two questions

edit: I think my question is how can I stop this?

change them once in a while the first one signs up manually then sells the questions and answers to the Russian mob, then they script the rest in.

big business what you gonna do?

There are a few mods that might help. Browse that forum. The only thing I do besides the q&a is, since we're a local forum, I have used cpanel to ban entire swaths of the planet as they've registered. At this point I doubt we can be seen from anywhere in Africa, most of eastern Europe, and a large part of Russia.

Hah I should do the same... Its a local forum, but oddly enough as local college students ga back home(overseas) we actually continue to see them come around.

I guess I'll look for a few mods

Don't bother stopping it. See my post here.

check their "home page" settings. My bet is they are duiattorney.com or some other such. They are trying to use black ops to get back links.

Glowhost makes an awesome mod that uses both stopforumspam and akismet. You can auto-report, send to mod, etc. It's a useful tool that has stopped over 500 spammers from hitting my board on 3.8.7, and when I upgraded it started over. Once spammers know your site is more difficult to enter you'll actually get less visitors. Since I've upgraded there have been steadily less attempts by spammers to get on my site.

@Macsee
"but if you castrate them properly they can't do any damage" I was laughing so hard I like to have parted company with my chair. You do have a good point there. I'll have to check that out.