What measurements do you take to prevent spammers from registering on you forums?

Do no allow users to register from e-mail address such as hotmail, yahoo etc?

Or A mod/admin must activate the account, which means that spammers must wait a few days before they can post, and thus they'll probably not bother to do that.

I've found that the second one works best. Although, you shouldn't wait a couple of days before approving someone's account. New members want to get posting right away, so it should be done within hours after they register.

Spammers usually sign up with names that refer to what they're spamming, or they'll use names such as jim435. And also their email address can be an indication that they're spammers. If it's admin@cheapviagra.com, you'll know it's no good. ;)

Another way is to have pre-moderation on in the forum. So that posts will have to be approved before they show up. But if the forum is popular, that can be a lot of work. And it kills the real time nature of a forum.

And if spammers do post, just ban them on sight.

I prefer to take a stance where little to no action is required on the staff to interfere with users. I would rather clean up after a spammer (and do) then to annoy the hell out of the users by making them wait even to start using the forum. It's hard enough getting users to sign up, I don't want another wall preventing them from posting.

So image verification and email verification is all I've got right now. On WMT we have a few other small things, like not being able to send PM's until they have reached 5 posts. But the active staff takes care of spam once it happens.

It's also about moderation, sometimes you can just spot from a mile away, who or what intends to spam or has spammed, recently we've had that encoded spamming crap :/ just about being a bit vigilant I guess.

If only there was a captcha upgrade for those of us who won't upgrade from 3.5 :|

I just limit the damage a newb can do, low pm limit, time between pm's set high, can't post everywhere, can't get in to every area of the site without a few posts.

What measurements do you take to prevent spammers from registering on you forums?

Do no allow users to register from e-mail address such as hotmail, yahoo etc?

Or A mod/admin must activate the account, which means that spammers must wait a few days before they can post, and thus they'll probably not bother to do that.

I've found that the second one works best. Although, you shouldn't wait a couple of days before approving someone's account. New members want to get posting right away, so it should be done within hours after they register.

Spammers usually sign up with names that refer to what they're spamming, or they'll use names such as jim435. And also their email address can be an indication that they're spammers. If it's admin@cheapviagra.com, you'll know it's no good. ;)

Another way is to have pre-moderation on in the forum. So that posts will have to be approved before they show up. But if the forum is popular, that can be a lot of work. And it kills the real time nature of a forum.

And if spammers do post, just ban them on sight.

I am getting a lot of attempted registrations with .de mail domains. Currently I am getting five or six obvious spammers registering each day, and some that are less obvious. I moderate registrations, and that has virtually eliminate my spam. The users like it because they don't see the spam.

It is humorous because certain of these spammers try over and over with the same names and addresses.

As an aside, the problem I have with AOL is that many of their users are not able to receive my confirmation mail, and then many are. There seems not to be any useful explanation for that.

In general, I try not to block any email unless they are very well known for problems, such as AOL, or if they are mainly used for spam messages (like emails form other countries that are used just for spam).

it is a moderation subject

usually i kill them on first sight. hahahah war junkie

I am using akismet support in 3.7 now to fight most spam. Which throws them into the moderation queue.

I have the image verification and a question you have to answer since then didn't have a spammer anymore while before when we banned email adresses and IP's I had around ten a day and even more in the weekends ;)

Very good to hear that Elise. Fighting spam will always be a problem. They will simply adapt their bots to have a group of 1500+ default Q+A and we need to be more original, etc.

NoSpam! mod and one touch spam-ban and cleanup. I have to take care of them manually.