Spambot Protections beside the current ones

Account activation and CAPTCHAs don't do anything other than twart real users, spammers found ways around those long ago.

I think we need something like this:

Proxy protection, which can probably be embedded into the register and login pages.

A hidden text box or such that only bots can see, this works very well (called honeypot method I think). So the bot will fill it out with junk and they can't register - doesn't stop Human Spammers.

StopForumSpam which requires the old, irritating to decipher RECAPTCHA to bypass. Doesn't load in web proxies so this means some proxies won't work either :)

Having a system where most good emails get activated automatically. If the email is not on the list, a PM must be sent to an admin to activate it. The only spammers that send PMs are the kitchen ones as far as I know, and I know a hell of a lot about spam bots.

Anything else? I'm really am against making post restrictions and such, it makes help slower just because of spam attacks. We need something to thwart the idiots and really throw them under a bus forever.

:)

Any suggestions otherwise? I think a forum should be accessible to all users. Of course, some people do like to hide their identity for privacy reasons which I can understand, but we'll have to boot it for registration.

Good suggestions but I am also against measures that make real people register harder.

Also, we are already using a plugin that makes use of StopForumSpam to block IPs of known spam bots.

That's good, my alternative methods are trying to make it a bit easier because I hate captchas.

Nice to see a StopForumSpam thing, you should report bots/spammers too, because not all of them bother to use a new IP address whenever they spam. :)