[Lee G]

From memory spam o matic works by connecting to different databases and checking ip when people hit the register button

This works even further up the line

It checks user agents, connection methods and the person gets an error page
Along with checking the ips against project honey pot
Using this, they spammers / scrapers / email harvesters dont even get a look at any pages, let alone being able to hit the register button

Its worth running the two side by side. I run the original stop forum spam from on here, along side this. I get very few spam registrations these days

I also found on my forums that htaccess user agent bans were not working
But by putting the same user agents into the blacklist file on the bad behavior mod, I can get around the problem. By adding all the search engines that are genuine to the whitelist file, you dont inadvertently block the likes of Google etc

One of the first things you notice is the lack of spam hitting your email each day