Finally upgraded from 1.27 version to latest 2.1
Never realized how much extra traffic to the SFS servers the old version caused till now.
It was logging about 10 users per hour but now down to about 10 per day
(I guess due as mentioned to the vB built-in Human Verification now occurring first before this)
Combined this with Spambot Stopper - which I imagine kicks in before this to stop the bots from registering.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2406414
So far everything works great!

(vB 4.1.12)