[tomarsyd]

Update:
First, thanks GlowHost for your input and response to my issue.

I'm posting my findings for anyone else who may come across this issue looking for answers.

I was up past 3am friday working on that issue. I was definitely aware of the policy which you mention, but to me, I felt like why do a spammer check if I was going to allow registration anyway. The issue for me was to figure out why it was erroring. It apparently wasn't that the SFS service was down.

Finally on Saturday I tested the CURL module and found that CURL had been disabled by my host ( but retained the ability to turn it back on) So I found where to do that and re-enabled it. Bingo! It works now.

So here's my issue with the plug-in (not really an issue, just something of note), if the code uses CURL, it should do a check to see if the CURL code is available and issue a LOG entry saying so. I'm a .NET developer and this is standard practice to log any kind of issue with remote calls.

At any rate, all seems to be well and it is properly turning away spammers once again.

I had installed Spam-O-Matic as well, but disabled because of the same REMOTEERR issue. So I may actually go and try it again because it has those extra features for submitting spammers via the admincp module.