Spam membership applications

I have this last few days had quite a few applications for membership to my forum. All applications have registered using a Yahoo email address. Names are a mix of letters /names /numbers, all followed with the number 10. I have deleted them as they have come in
They are clearly spam applications. My usual way of dealing with applications for membership is to email the address used for registration, this tells me if the email is genuine or not. I ask a series of questions and expect the applicant to reply in a given time. Genuine applicants usually promptly reply and I then activate the account. I know this looks a bit long winded but it keeps out undesirables. These spam applications are now becoming tedious, I may without intending to, activate one which may prove to be disastrous for my forum. Is there anything that forumotion can do to stop these spam applications or offer any advice.

Hello,

Forumotion has an intericate anti spam system in place which blocks millions of spammers every minute, however, no system is perfect and there is always the possibilty of some seeping through the cracks. The best thing you can do is set your forum to admin only activation and look for any e-mail addresses with periods are that are so long that no human would ever want to use it. There is no definitive to completely prevent spammers from attempting to register on any site, some will find their way in somehow, someway, the only you can do is put every preventive measure that you can and if you do activate one by mistake, then you can simply ban it and delete any posts it makes.

-Brandon

I already have the forum set to admin only activation. Many thanks for your reply. I will keep a close eye on the situation