[TalkVirginia]

What would it take to use this API and link it in with the registration process so that it validates a visitors IP before registering them?

This website offers an API to check against their database of known spammer IPs.

http://www.stopforumspam.com/apis

It's a simple HTTP GET, and the page will return some simple XML indicating the type of search performed, whether it appears or not in our database, and the number of times it appears (frequency).

A typical successful response would look like this:

<response success="true">
<type>ip</type>
<appears>yes</appears>
<lastseen>2007-09-18 05:48:53</lastseen>
<frequency>2</frequency>
</response>
Here are some examples:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?ip=91.186.18.61
http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?ema...ehis5e@mail.ru
http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?username=MariFoogwoogy

Based on a return of "yes", you can choose to deny registration. The lookup is case insensitive, too. Note that you will get an error message if your IP address or email address is improperly formatted.

Taken one step further it would be nice to have the process write the IP or IP range to the .htaccess file.