A PHPBB2 forum I'm on has a significant spam bot problem. Do you use any mods to protect against that stuff here, or is it pure force of moderation?

I think rit has instituted an image and email verification during sign up to eliminate some bots. I'm not sure how well it works because I still get a lot of potential spammers that I delete manually that have never activated their account and have seem to be obvious fake email domains.

When I took over most of the last few dozen membership pages were 90% silent spammers (those who join just to post a link in their profile for the googlebots to find). I have manually deleted most of these and I have banned certain email domains that are known spammer domains. The .ru domains are notorious for this but instead of banning an entire country I have only banned the ones we saw repeat offenders from and add more when new ones show up.

There are some phpbb mods to help prevent spammers which I asked rit to look into. At this point we are leaning toward Administrator approved accounts but wanted to find a way to add the Senior Community Staff to the group that approves so we don't have legitimate new posters waiting on one person. I believe there are mods that will prevent the website links in the profile from being used until the poster has a certain number of posts and ones that hide the membership list from guests, I think what is available depends on what version of phpbb you have. Either of which should discourage those who join just to post the link in their profile.

I don't play with the code here so I have to wait for rit to look into all the options and decide which works best. For now all the mods keep an eye on the membership list and I try to delete the obvious spammers daily. Unfortunately, some actual spammer get through and post but those threads are caught quickly and removed and those posters are banned.

GAH! NINJA'D BY Wile E!
*editing out reiteration of what Wile E said*

In fact one of our training assignments was to go through the Memberlist and mark out every suspect user. Users who had never posted, or had one post, or had nothing but a link in thier profile to a spam page, etc... Wile E called it the "Gah I can't keep up with this" project. The thread was locked out after 12 pages of posts (most posts with over 5 spammers) when we acheived modhood.

Is it not ironic that this thread has a spam post in it?

Mods - I am in awe of your skills and dedication, but I sure as $&#% don't envy you the job!