We have had a little problem of late with spambots..
Unfortunately as any forum software becomes more popular then people will try and find ways of exploiting it... For some time now there have been web bots that have successfully cracked SMF's image verification software and it is a bit of a race between the creators of this software and the makers of SMF.
I've been patching the forum like crazy, some of you may have noticed that we are up to version 1.9 now, and today after three bots got through I decide to add another mod, there is a random question now asked at registration to determine if a user is human before allowing registration, if this mod doesn't work then I'll write my own but in the meantime apologies for these fake accounts, hopefully the problem is fixed now.
I've been having problems with bots on my own SMF board too, and I have contemplated modifying the random image generator slightly to stop them.
However, there's a chance it may stop certain future updates from working. I'll back up the necessary files and let you know what happens.
All you need to do is back up the registration templates and add some new fields which need validating, the bots directly inject variables into the form so it should be easy to fool them into thinking that registration is disabled on the forum...
What I mean is, just generate the appropriate error message for bots ;) check to see if they set the variables in your custom form..
I see what you mean. I'll give it a try tonight.
Thanks again to our members staying on their toes and reporting bad posts. I was able to delete them right away.
Those bots are becomming increasingly clever, one i saw about the chemist had multi lingual tags for search engine spiders to find. I infact thought it was actually a real person.