[michael3185]

I’ve been interested in this myself, and have asked a few questions regarding spammers. One mostly private forum I’ve built will remain very small, perhaps 40 to 50 members max. Another, though, might grow quite large (though not in the thousands, I think). I’ve got the approve-user-registration plugin active on both, and caught one hand-spammer (sic!) with it, and just denied him.

I’m going to leave it active on the larger one too, and perhaps modify the register page so that ‘Website:’ becomes ‘Reason to apply’ (or similar). Then check for anything like a URL in any of the fields (even I can do that), and disallow if one is found. Saves me having to look at a stack waiting for approval. All I’ll need to do is read through those waiting, approve any that look fine, or email them to ask for validation of some kind if not. That’s my theory, anyway.