Does Anyone Know Why?
 

I have been having quite the battle with spambots signing up for bogus accounts by the dozen. They have gone so far as hacking my password (a problem now solved) to remove the human verification options. Most but not all of these accounts list trash for homepages but none of them ever make a post. While I have them under control, I cannot help but wonder why they do it. I can't believe it's fun to be so persisent doing this for years on end, there must be some way to profit from it. Does anyone know how these guys profit from this strange activity? I am very curious about why they do it.

A link to your site might help us identify problems.

My forum is at http://www.jouster.com/forums, but I think I have things under control. I just remain curious about what the motive is behind this nonsense.

One of the motive behind this nonsense is getting backlinks for SEO.
Other one may be just to annoy the forum owners ... lol

Well, the annoying is effective, the links not so much. I get a notice odf new registrations and they are goners in minutes!

I'd suggest new Q&A and more than one. Once you figure out a single question Q&A its pretty much broken.

You need a minimum of 10 or so.

Thanks! In your opinion is CAPTCHA more or less effective than a 10 question Q & A? Just as a tip to others, they were hacking my password (an 6 - I w10 character word hashed with numbers and characters) and turning off Human Verification. I have solved this by using a password generator to generate a 30 character password which I now change weekly.

I'd go with as many Q&A as possible relevant to your site.

Thanks!