# recent wave of spam bots



## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

I don't know if ehmac is experiencing this (asked but never heard back)

But it seems spambots have now cracked recaptcha, which has until now been very effective in curbing them on any sort of registration, submission type of online anything.

I admin a vb for a friend to help out is where I first discovered this, as well as a few other client installations. I found that adding a custom question, like what is the 3rd letter in 'this' word, stopped them all in their tracks. Worked very well in VB as well. Haven't seen one in over a week now. That's down from about 80 a day.


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## John Clay (Jun 25, 2006)

We use both ReCaptcha and a custom question, and only get the occasional bot - I'm assuming they're manually registering.


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## Guest (Jan 25, 2011)

For the forums I admin we use both custom questions and we check against the database at stopforumspam.com (which is fairly complete and pretty quickly updated). Gave up on recaptcha's and the like a while back, I think they have been cracked for a while now.


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## Guest (Jan 25, 2011)

John Clay said:


> We use both ReCaptcha and a custom question, and only get the occasional bot - I'm assuming they're manually registering.


Yep, the manual registrations are hard to get around. One one forum I admin at a person doing it all even had the gall to PM me asking why his previous account got deleted (it was due to signature spam), then proceeded to keep asking if such and such was permissible in signatures (yet more signature spam) and arguing that it wasn't restricted in the registration agreement or terms of service.


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