Spammers driving me nuts

[Gladius2007]

A few months ago spammers started hitting our forums... dozens of spammer registrations every day. Most of them don't post anything, but our members list is ballooning with spammer registrations with spam links in the Home Page field or in their signature.

So far I've tried a number of suggested tactics and mods to slow them down, but nothing helped. It literally makes no difference what I install - the spammer registrations keep coming in. Currently I'm using KeyCAPTCHA in conjunction with [GlowHost] Spam-O-Matic, but I might as well be using nothing because we're still getting dozens of spammers signing up every day.

We're on 3.8.5 and won't be moving to 4.x in the near future.

I thought about making a buffer usergroup for newbies (most of which would be spammers) that would require X posts for promoting them to full members which would be allowed signatures, but my worry is that the spammers would still keep signing up, they just wouldn't be able to enter signatures (the Home Page field doesn't seem to be possible to restrict :/). As it is, I'm at least able to identify over 90% of spammer accounts because they have spam links in their sigs. I'm afraid that if I turn off signatures for newbies, I'd have no quick way to identify most spammers while their signups would still keep coming in. I'd wind up with a very high member count, but 99% of them would be spammers, which I obviously don't want.

Has anyone else had this dilemma or something similar? It's really pissing me off that I'm losing so much time on spammers and nothing seems to deter them.

I'm hoping that there's a mod out there or something that would help me deal with this because I'm out of ideas what to do.

[futureaudio]

Keeping spammers out is a cat and a mouse game.
Have you tried "Question and Answer Verification" from human verification option? That can work with some creative questions which you change every now and then as needed.

BTW, you can put a restriction on homepage field through custom coding if a mod/feature to do that is not already present in vbulletin.

[Boofo]

have you tried the IsBot mod by calorie?