I've got a couple forums I help run, and dealing with spammers is a recurring problem. They either want to get an account with a link their site in their profile, or they want to active post spam in the forums - or both. There's been a bit of an upsurge in the little bastards lately, apparently they're getting through the "image verification" systems more easily now - or they're just going the sweatshop route and having humans make the accounts. Either way, it's a pain. What I've taken to doing is setting the forums so that the users must be approved before their active. With phpBB I also had to modify the code so that the user list only shows active users - for some reason it showed inactive users by default before! So even if they'd never clicked the activation link, they'd still get the url in their profile on the forum's user list. So now, when I'm going through the list of new users to be moderated, I follow these steps: Check th...
A repository of handy little tips I'm building for the benefit of my fellow web developers.