[ranz]

I'm finding vbulletin has some excellent antispam mechanisms inbuilt and are proving quite effective.

We use the Akismet Anti-Spam key and find it really sucessful. This is under Spam Management in Vbulletin Options in the AdminCP.

The Anti-Spam API key is used to enable the scanning service for user generated data. The data will sent to the specified service for identification.

If the data is identified as spam, it will be marked for moderation to allow for verification by moderators. You should give your moderators the 'Can Moderate' permission to allow for this.

When a user gets past our registration (I'll explain why below), and they put a spammy post up - Akismet has always flagged it as spam and put it into the mod queue - so no members see it on the public board.

Unfortunately you cannot get passed human assisted bot registrations. This is the same method that one of your legitimate users use to register an account on your forum. So this is why Akismet is an affective second base tool to combat spam.

There are plenty of topics about spam on this forum - so I suggest you read the articles which are "best practices" for preventing spam on your site.

ETA:

This is also an excellent mod to prevent unwanted user registrations (vMail - Email confirmation before registration):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=201466