Defeating the spammers

[wrestlepower]

As you are no doubt aware, all of us seem to be getting a massive influx of spammers on our forums advertising porn, viagra and all that kind of stuff. I'm equally aware that tehre are currently hacks available in the mod section which can combat this. I've tried two of the hacks with limited success (the advanced image verification by steadicomop and the alternative to captcha by antialiasis).

Now, i'm by no means a programmer and barely have a clue what i'm doing with most vB functions, but i can see two possible ways around this.

Firstly, all these bots sign up with the sme birthdate, March 28 1983. On every single forum i've seen the spammers, they always have this birthdate. If something could be devised to ban this date, then that could be a good temporary solution. I realis that by doing that we would be preventing people actually born on that date from signing up, but thats only going to be a small percentage of people and i could live with that. Also, this would most likely only be temporary and the bots would figure a way round it eventually.

The second possibility is to only allow signups from people with certain email addresses. All these bots use obscure email accounts like 24inmail.com or mail.ru. If we could restrict signups to email accounts provided by hotmail, aol, yahoo and the other big ones, we could solve the problem. Again, this will rule out an awful lot of genuine people from joining, as some people may not have an address liek that and those that dont may not want to join a sign up for one simply to jpin a forum.

So, would either of these suggestions be at all possible?