Basically, from now on people will not be allowed to register an account if their name, email address or IP is listed in a "known forum spammers" database. There is a small possibility of this catching up some innocents, i'd ask anyone who feels they did get caught up by mistake to therefore email me with all the details.

Good luck with the IPs.  I've been logging attacks on my system for years, and they always seem to point back to dynamic addresses at AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon.

Supposedly, the "wonky passphrase" (type in the letters you see in the graphic...) approach works pretty well but I don't know how difficult it would be to implement, especially as you have to make accomodation for visually impaired users.

good,less work for our mods/admins

Captcha.

CAPTCHAs work well sometimes, but don't work well othertimes, if that makes sense.....

Oh, and they don't work against actual people (not all spammers are bots), or bots that use relay attacks, or bots that have high-performance visual recognition systems, etc etc - this combined with any accommodation you might need to make being a hole and it makes it more trouble than its worth

Anyway, it seems a lot of spammers use common usernames and email addresses, and some own their own IP blocks

I have a lot of trouble sometimes reading the letters on those.

You know what's scary? A Firefox addon named SkipScreen that is intended to skip unnecessary web pages can actually recognize the Capatcha on Megaupload and enter it right every time. Of course, the version that can do this is not allowed on Mozilla's add on website, but the makers of SkipScreen host it on their blog.

I don't think they are doing this for forum registrations, yet. And I'm hoping that they will NOT do it because it would aid the spammers more than help people by automating downloads on websites like Megaupload and Rapidshare.

I'm just saying that if a harmless Firefox addon is capable of reading Capatcha, then surely, bots can read them too.

Captcha is pretty worthless.

Well, it comes as no surprise that I'm behind the times again.  It's the kind of thing that happens when you genuinely don't care anymore.