What are you guys doing here to keep the spam out of the boards? We decided to stop having people email us to join, because it wasn't working out, but now that we have that turned off, we are starting to get random spammers signing up posting porn all over the board.
In the phpBB registration code, there are some numbers that adjust how unclear the anti-bot code is. Well, I set that to damn near unreadable, but made it so that it was basically six of the same character. That way, there was no way to read all six character, but a normal human would see the pattern and just type in the same six characters.
Of course, we don't get too many newcomers in here anyway, but it certainly stopped the spam.
Here's how it looks (need to log out first)
Also notice how I put in a different variable for the COPPA acceptance. It doesn't work as well, but it's another thing to try. I would highly recommend the anti-bot code edit, though.
Look under includes/usercp_confirm.php, and change around the "chr(mt_rand(140, 255))" numbers here. I added this line in usercp_register.php:
$code = str_repeat(substr($code, 0, 1), 6); // small change to make it 6 of the same character