stopping spam

bushwalk.com admin commented on how they stop spam wayno wrote: Hi i notice this site doesnt seem to get automated spam messages getting through, is anyone able to advise what they use to control the spam please? i am a member of tramper.co.nz and they are having problems getting on top of automated spam We get a HUGE amount of attempted spam here. We manage it via several strategies, some automated, and some manual. Here's what we have: •During registration, the form includes a simple random question/answer that is configurable. The questions are simple for a real human (eg, "what is the main colour on this web page?"), but difficult for an automated spam bot. This, alone, has gotten rid of 100% of automated spam bots. •A custom modification to the registration script that looks up the email address and IP address in the stopforumspam.com database. If both are found in the database, then the registration is denied. Denied registrations are logged at http://bushwalk.com/spam.txt (where you can see we block about 10 per day). •New users must have at least one post approved manually by a moderator, before their posts appear in topics automatically. This catches many more spammers, but it is often difficult to tell, and we get a few false positives as well as a few false negatives. We also check the IP address and signature of many of the first-posts, it is very unusual to get spam from an Australian IP address, and spammers often have a signature linking to another site.