I wonder if switching over to a new forum type wouldn't help cure this issue...
All forums use pretty much the same systems for preventing spam. Invision forums are actually one of the best (and most expensive) in the industry. Most spam prevention is simply requiring email validations. This is the best tool for spam prevention. The next most important tool is the verification code system, which makes people copy a series of characters from an image. This should prevent spam-bots from signing up, because generally bots cant read text on an image.
The next way forums prevent spam is by banning email domains like im starting to do now. I've seen many forums that simply do not allow people to sign up with emails from any free email service. Ill bet cs.com and supraforums have both already implemented similar domain filtering to what im trying to do now. Though, id be interested to know exactly how they do handle spam prevention.
I have considered upgrading to the latest Invision system for a while, but it would require me to upgrade apache and php. Both of these upgrades would be fairly time consuming and might break other portions of the site and almost always cause unforeseen problems. Not to mention, lengthy downtime.
There really is no way to switch to a completely different forum system at this point. The database format is different in some small but very important ways. So we would loose all of the posts/accounts/uploaded images/profiles.
Also I was just wondering, When you ban a spamer. Dose it remove the menber # from "registered members" list or dose it stay on there?? Looks like it does. Because we have about 1000 members and I'm like 1200 something??? Kinda weard.
I usually ban by suspending their account. Their account still exists but is unable to login or post.
The reason your member number is so much more that our registered members count is because of the email verification system. Lots of spammers and people who just don't like to give out their emails have tried to register. But, since they used a fake address they were never able to activate the account. The forums automatically delete these accounts after 48 hours.
At the moment our registered members count is 1,058... however the last registered member is number 1,657. That means that there have been 599 people who have tried to register with a fake email, but couldn't. Chances are almost all of these were spammers.
It'd be nice to be able to ban the members that screwed others over on the forum too.
Actually, I never bothered to ban them. Perhaps I should. Or at least change their title to "Scammer" or something
