I think it would be a good idea to have clear rules on how to deal with spam threads. Like whether to post snarky comments in the spambot-created thread and such.

I will delete spam threads as soon as I see them. It doesn't matter to me whether people post in them first.

I like to adresse the issus of the spam bots who seem to be increasing. I know that manual selection is kind of an overwork for you but am sure there other simple solution to prevent automated registering

I have the anti-spambot features enabled, which requires both email verification and asks the registering user to read a graphic and decipher a series of letters and numbers. The graphic is a pretty good countermeasure against automated registrations.

The spammers who are posting here are probably registering manually, and then posting spam either using a bot or manually.

I don't think requiring moderator verification is a good idea at this stage. I don't want to end up in the same situation as the Digital Webbign forums (where people couldn't get verified)... for now, if I can't get into the forums for a few days I'd much rather have a spam message undeleted for a few days than have someone who wants to participate in the discussion wait for a few days to get validated.

If the situation gets worse, I will investigate other options, but for now it's just a nuisance.

Suggestion: Is it possible to limit topic creation? For example, setting a barrier which prohibits a user from creating new topics if they have under a certain number of posts.

Could be interesting but am not sure of it efficiency, those bots sometime do their spam in any open post, so they would quickly fill that limit.

I've never seen a bot go past five posts, though assuming that individuals are registering they might just program a work around (though I doubt they read anything here and they just do some automated process and fill in the blanks for registering. If they did read here they would notice that they are targeting an audience of 2 dozen people )

That's an interesting idea, but I don't see a way to implement it within phpBB's scheme.

I believe it's possible to make it so that new user registrations are placed in the Newly Registered Users group. Then you can just edit the permissions for that group so they can't post without approval and can't start new threads. Add an intro forum (hide all other forums from them), with one thread that's basically a simple terms of use and make the new person post "I agree" or something and bam, you have a filter of sorts.

Also might want to change the CAPTCHA, default phpbb3 captcha got busted a year or two ago, and reCAPTCHA was cracked recently as well (though I did notice some changes in how it does things recently, it requires an API key to use, not difficult to acquire). Doing the 'fill in these special profile fields' countermeasure doesn't really work either.

The Question/Answer setup actually works well, but you need to be careful with the options. Can't be a simple math question, or what color is the sky/grass question, as bots can answer those. Make it something like "Who writes the science fiction comic Outsider?" with Arioch of Jim Francis as acceptable answers. Things people can find out if they don't know, but can't be easily solved by word matching.

Wonder how any company hope to accomplish something by annoying his potential customer with spam?

what language is that?

Try Google Translator until it makes sense.

well, on the problem of spam bots....KILL IT, KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!!....or a Loroi WMD of some kind

how about we turn their own weapon against them?

so long as WMDs are included i don't mind

Loroi WMD? Women of Mass Desire?

that'll work, fry their circuits