How to stop spam bots on vb 4.x?

[CarlitoBrigante]

Usage of automated bots to bypass most of captchas was the norm; in these days, you can see real people being used to pass through anti-spam protection, especially in forums or in blogging environments where there is a high ROI for spam. I have seen an increase of this type of spam especially in forums around Forex, or forums that in general provided services that had immediate value outside of the forums, like classifieds.

These posters behave like normal members for the first 10-15 posts; at that point, they switch to spammer mode, sometimes in subtle ways. Any form of captcha is entirely useless in these cases; solutions like the one above or even Akismet and centralized spammers IPs databases in general are necessary.