Spaming and inappropriate posting from virtual members

My name is Junior and I am the administrator of www.mytrucksource.com

I have been realitively succesful in keeping my forum running smoothly thanks to the help of some valued members.

however, recently, we have been getting daily registrations from either "bots" or just punks that are posting spam all over my site. In addition, they are incorporating pornographic links into their signatures that when i go to remove them, do not even appear for me, as if they were never there to begin with.

I am tired of banning members who just join, or having to spend my time cleaning up these messes.

So my question, and serious concern is, is there a way we can add a CAPTCHA to user registrations? And perhaps the same feature for a intital set amount of posts, simply to help slow this down?

I know I can set the permissions to have admin permission for all new accounts, but I cannot see if it is a real person or a computer from my home PC either way. So I truely believe with the advancement in modern internet browsing and crawlers, having the option as an ADMIN to add a CAPTCHA to user registrations, or random ones for posts etc, will help to slow down the unnescesary, and totally inappropriate, postings.

Thank you, and I look forward to any help that can be offered.

~Junior

Hello,

Here are a few helpful things, I will first give you a link to a tutorial on how to add captcha images.

1 -> Captcha => https://help.forumotion.com/tricks-tips-f32/how-to-add-image-verification-to-your-forum-t9643.htm
2 -> Account activation => I would recommend to be user; How do bots check their emails? they can't
3 -> Easy clean up and verification of REAL people. (Yes, this does seam awfully silly, but heck, if it beats the bots, it's worth it, isn't it?)

Step 1: Create a new group, call it "Just humans" (or whatever else you rather)and make it a Auto-subscribe = YES, post count = 5, Make it HIDDEN. Save.

Step 2: Create a new forum, name it as you wish, however it is just so that you can verify that your members are human, set it's permissions as you desire, but do include the new group we just created. Save.Now, go around to all your other forums, and allow this new group "Just Humans" to enter in all these forum, assuming you want all humans to access your forums.
Simple as that

Now, that should basically prevent these bots from destroying your forums, and all their posts would be together, and you can simply go from your admin panel and delete it every few days and re-do the perms, or just trash each topic as it comes, whatever you believe is the best for your wants.



Unfortunately, it is mostly bots coming around and spamming
Also, I would like to inform you in advance that modern bots are now being programmed quite well, and may be able to read captcha images




Regards,
Darren.