Some of you may have noticed a few random and sometimes innapropriate posts on the boards. These aren't the work of real members, just programmed spammers. I'll try to get rid of them ASAP, and I've also made the process for become a member a little stricter. Please report any thread that looks suspicious so that I can get rid of it promptly.

IDEA!

Just add 'Type wagon backwards to prove that your human', then registration will only be accepted if you type nogaw.

I think there's already a randomly generated activation code thing... I think.

Ahh so thats where that post come from darn bots...

The best way for small forums remains to create a custom anti-bot system. However simple it is, no one will be bothered to develop a bot specifically for us...

Stupid bots, spambots

I saw some ways to stop the bots from spamming, after any message you write, down of it, Provides a question that only the users know. 'Cause the bots don't know the answer of the question, they can't post anything in the forum

mfgg did like "who is the red plumber who saves princess peach and fights bowser" something like that

Another type of bot is the clever bot.They typically trace from India and it tries to pick up certain words in a topic to try and make their posts sound as human as possible, but half the time it still doesn't make sense.

Yea, I've seen a post like that in our thread over on RPG Revolution. It was like. "I love Super Mario. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is my favorite game. Mario is a good game series." And I was like, what does that have to do with Starlite Worlds?

Hey guys!

TBH, I would only switch over to admin-activated accounts as a last-resort measure. It does bad things to your new user influx rates, and then by extension to the community, based on my analysis of the Transcendence community over time, based on the community structure and forum security measures. Things there have improved considerably since myself and a bunch of other regulars got promoted, and have taken over the duty of new user activation, but that still entails having a large, top-heavy staff structure.
The custom activations questions system is supported by default in SMF 2.0, (ie, view my forum's registration system at http://forums.devdb.org/register.php ), however I do not think that phpbb3 supports it by default, which is rather disappointing; it only supports its built-in captcha, and captchas are generally not very strong in and of themselves.
I'm not sure how freeforums.org runs things, but you may or may not be able to load mod packages that would give you the ability to use custom questions.