[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

I have definitely found the registration timers to be the most effective. I guess it depends on how hard you get spammed with automated registrations, but you may only get one or two registrations to slip through a week/month/year. But it's pretty much eliminated the need for CAPTCHAs or human tests on my vB sites. I only get a genuine spammer about once a month or less.

I'm with you there... The botnets have defeated human verification totally on all the major email providers - yahoo, gmail, hotmail, and so on. Then on top of that, they get the email verification code FROM US on pageload after creating account, making the native email verification useless too.

None of the native human verification methods used in vBulletin work anymore, but it's not a problem common only to vBulletin.

The timer mods have a finite shelf life, for when botnet admins and/or the developers of autospam programs such as XRumer figure those out they will no doubt program a delay into their registration process. This of course will be hit or miss, since they have no real way of knowing what your timer setting is - unless of course we tell them, by putting a countdown clock on the "submit" button like some timer mods do.

Stopping spam requires layers of checks and protections - there's no one single "magic bullet." But the hardest thing about it really isn't stopping the spam - it's stopping the spam without annoying legitimate human recruits with a bunch of mindless hoops to jump through like questions, puzzles, captchas, email verification and so on - which are obsolete anyway.