increasing amount of spam on forum...

[whiteblue1942]

i am having an issue with an increasing amount of spam on my forum, most for people giving away WoW gold.

any ideas on how to stop this or slow it down? i am banning people left and right but the keep popping up...

[SNN]

reCAPTCHA should do the trick, it has for my forum.
It's now built into vBulletin, if you have a license.
You can find more about reCAPTCHA at www.recaptcha.net

[sweeps78]

reCaptcha has actually been broken:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=272439&highlight=spam

[cheat-master30]

I've found the specialised question and answer thing has worked well, along with banning all spammer domain extensions and pre moderating the first five posts of every single user (and also moderating their PMs, visitor messages, blog entries, blog comments and social group activities until then). Have not had one bot for about six months.

[sweeps78]

prior to about 3 or 4 weeks ago, I didn't have hardly any spammers (for about 3 years running multiple vBulletin forums) and didn't do a thing to my forums to prevent them, except for just having the image verification turned on. The amount of spammers I've been getting these last few weeks is absurd...