[Zarxrax]

Originally Posted by In Omnibus

StopForumSpam will catch a good deal of it if set up to check both IP addresses and e-mail addresses. Unfortunately, it won't catch everything.

The new Recaptcha will catch virtually all spambots but human spammers can still bypass it.

I find the most effective spam tool is still using the Question And Answer function. If you ask questions that only real people with a genuine interest in your forum can answer, and that don't have "yes" or "no" or "true" or "false" type answers it will stop most of the spam most of the time.

If, for example, you are a math forum, and you ask "How many pieces of pii are in a circle?" only a math nerd would even understand the question. It's not something answerable by a bot or most human spammers.

LOL, the stopforumspam website links to this plugin as the way to implement it on vbulletin 4.
I also have Question and Answers set up on registration that can not be solved by a bot, but that isn't helping lately. I would imagine that any good bot software would keep a database of questions and answers so they only have to be answered once, anyways.