Let's talk about spam bots

I am glad to hear this.  I am building a new cheetah site so will go and look at that now.  Thanks Deano.  You are addressing issues in Cheetah that Boonex wouldn't.

Cheetah has built in spam bot detection that will catch most all automated bots.

You will find it in the spam tools in admin. A new tab called bot detection.

I know dolphin has issues with bots, but that should not be a major problem with Cheetah.

It's been in use on this site for quite awhile. It has blocked 2236 attempts so far. Blocks on average between 30-50 bot signup attempts each month.

I am working on a Dolphin site but this will relate to sites built with Cheetah as well.  I am having difficulty with spam bots registering fake accounts.  I tried putting in a human check question and yet, they are still getting through.  I know they are bots because I removed the "Description" box from the join form yet some of them are still filling it in.  The only thing that has slowed them down was removing numerals from the user name.  I noticed that a lot of the fake registrations contained a string of numerals after the name; an attempt to prevent being stopped by a user that is already using that name. 

We need to discuss what can be done to help stop the spammers from registering fake accounts; or at least slow them down to a manageable level.  I will continue to play with the human question format to see if that can help but if the human question is too difficult then that is an impediment against real users.