I'm a member on another message board. Tiny new community. And they are inundated with spammers. Any clues on how to effectively get rid of them? I only ask cause I know it was a problem on this board at some time.

this is more of an admin than mod question really, but the upgrade to phpBB3 seems to have gotten rid of them here.

Yup. Either updgrade, or maybe try implementing registration Captchas.

captchas? is that that funky letter thing like with ticketfucker?

yeah.

they have that.

Their captcha may have been broken then. Are the letters really plain? It's more difficult for the computer to decipher if the letters are connected.

Either that, or it's not bots at all, but actual people.

i guess they are people. but why on earth would they invade a tiny astros board with less than 20 members? lol.

case sensitive also

Probably people found it and turned some bots loose on it.

Perhaps the Astros have done something to upset Anonymous. The internet is serious business, you know.

I manage a very smal phpBB2l board, and spam registrations had become quite an issue. I installed a hack called Textual Confirmation, and it works quite well. You can choose the text and the answer to the question. For instance, you can simply enter the question "Are you human?" and the answer "yes" in the ACP and that will be the question/answer in the registration form. The downside is that if you should forget to choose to not be alerted to spam registrations by email, your inbox ends up looking like this: