almost every user online at any given time here is a bot, you can tell because they usually have advertising in their sig and/or profile if you click on their name. there are always hundreds of guests online as well at all times and you can be sure that they are bots trying to register, but your captcha stops a large chunk of it.
i had this exact same problem on a forum that i run, captcha didn't really help in any way whatsoever. some bots can beat it now. the only way i found that i could stop them is to use a question and answer thing in the registration. ditch the captcha and try it. it DOES work! as soon as i switched to that, the bot registration stopped completely. there hasn't been one single bot or spam post since.
try it! it's ridiculous that 95% of your server's bandwidth is taken up by spam bots. this sh!t really needs to stop. i'd like to see them get cracked down on, but what can really be done? especially when they all come from china or russia.
i also recommend you have a look at the IP ranges most of them are coming from and filter them out at the web server configuration level with an .htaccess file. don't use the forum software options to do it, it will still suck a lot of resources from the server machine that way.
i had this exact same problem on a forum that i run, captcha didn't really help in any way whatsoever. some bots can beat it now. the only way i found that i could stop them is to use a question and answer thing in the registration. ditch the captcha and try it. it DOES work! as soon as i switched to that, the bot registration stopped completely. there hasn't been one single bot or spam post since.
try it! it's ridiculous that 95% of your server's bandwidth is taken up by spam bots. this sh!t really needs to stop. i'd like to see them get cracked down on, but what can really be done? especially when they all come from china or russia.
i also recommend you have a look at the IP ranges most of them are coming from and filter them out at the web server configuration level with an .htaccess file. don't use the forum software options to do it, it will still suck a lot of resources from the server machine that way.
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