What is the best way to get users to sign up to your site without letting automated spam bots in and to make things frontendy?

I have searched and searched yet the only option I can find are those premium plugins (which have many vulnerabilities in them).

what I want to to do is simple:

Have a front end registration page with fields for login, password, why does this person want to join… and a custom captcha question… and then somewhere in the admin panel I want to be able to just approve or decline users based on what they put in the why do you want to join field.

I also want to make this the only place for users to register from… else spammers will just use the normal wordpress sign up to get access.

How can I go about doing all of this?

Please help.

Thank you.

[@robkk Moderator 9 years, 2 months ago]

Use wanguard for a question captcha. Manually approving users can be done with a plugin listed in this guide or if you use BuddyPress too, a plugin listed in their guide possibly. Approving based on a certain field, I am not sure.

Theme my login is probably the best to use for frontend forms. bbPress has some form shortcodes you can use but they might not work as great because there is functionality missing.

Dealing with Spam