My suggestion:

Some spam control

I ban approximately 5 users a day for spamming. I believe you happened to see one that had not been caught.

Spamming has been an issue for a while now. I have tried increasing the CAPTCHA difficulty, but received emails saying that real people couldn't answer the CAPTCHA correctly because it got too difficult.

I continue to try to find ways to make it quicker to ban/delete, but at this point it would take a custom modification to the forums in order to implement anything worthwhile. That's something I have tried to do, but haven't found a good modification that will actually work - and work well.

Alright, here's to hoping that there will be less spambots. I have implemented a few features to try to provided additional layers of spam and spambot registration prevention.

I don't know which version of phpbb this is, but when I was administering a board that was having spam problems I found a simple mod that helped a lot. It was a module that allowed a simple, custom question and answer during sign up.

My question was "Are you a robot?" with an answer of "no" being correct. It totally eliminated the auto-sign up bots. Of course, if they cared enough they'd have figured it out... but I guess they didn't.

How about: "What is the air speed of a laden swallow?" *grin*

Regards,
Xander

African or European?

I actually just put this in, however.. one bot was able to make it through within an hour. I checked in this morning and I didn't see any though so I guess it's better at least.

Yeah, there seemed a distinct lull in the spam attacks this weekend. Perhaps it was a holiday weekend in Russia?

Regards,
Xander