Subject says it all. Here and in Off Topic. Time for Jorge to perform a clean up, surely. And just where is he again anyway?

where seems to have gone.

Do you suppose (a) this helps and (b) this thread itself is not spam?

Yeah, you're not entirely wrong. Maybe I could have titled it better - like 'Where's Jorge Again' or similar. So, sorry. It is annoying though, and Jorge keeping vanishing for weeks on end really is not helping.

Jorge can vanish any time he wants. He doesn't need to help you.

If you're looking to start a flame war - you certainly seem to have a knack for rubbing ppl up the wrong way - you've come to the wrong folks and place.

PITA they are using real text from older posts here in the forum.

Hey, welcome back Jorge, where've ya been man? Steve (oOSGEAROo) and I have been trying to get your attention if you haven't noticed yet.

And indeed, real PITA that. Barstewards. (A polite form of saying B*stards.)

Anyway, good to see you around again and hope you're OK.

Thanks.

Spammers use a combination of humans and bots. They use paid people in China or India to get around the anti-spam measures that bots cannot get through to create the user account, and then bots to actually post content using those accounts.

This has been tried before, many years ago, by that infamous (and famous) British criminal that sold k*tchens in the UK. It's very hard if not impossible to defend against.

I fought it by replacing every instance and variation of k*tchen (even now I cannot spell the full word eheh) with 'vance miller is a spammer', which made their marketing useless and incomprehensible. But it took a long time for it to stop.

Yeah, I remember we had this elsewhere/elsewhen.
Just a thought that might help - when new users register, why not give them some random, difficult/impossible to machine-read letters/numbers to re-enter? We've got that on Steve's new phpBB forum. At least it could prevent spam bots.

This forum is old and cannot be changed because it has been customized to match the look of the Winstep web site, so if they are using humans to provide the correct answer to the custom profile fields when creating a new account there isn't much I can do other than delete/ban them after the fact.

I already changed the profile questions but the spammers keep coming.

And very nicely it's done, too. Actually, out of all phpBB forums that I use/have used, this is by far the best looking one, nice navigation etc. etc.

I suppose there's no plug-in or anything in/for phpBB 2 to allow for random alphanumeric text or some sort of Gotcha. But it would be an even greater pain than having to deal with the spammers to change to phpBB 3 I'm sure. 3 certainly is a real pig to configure etc. going by our experience.

This I will say there is all-sorts of plugin's to do with capture/gotcha and they are there whether they are as secure is another matter.

There are indeed, but that phpBB 3. This board is phpBB 2. Different beasts.