Spam Tools including AKISMET Spam prevention is urgently required
 

My suggestion comes after using IPB for a year, and then coming back to VB.

IPB has a spam prevention service (which they charge for use on a yearly basis) whereby board owners can flag users as spammers, which sends the spam info to the IPB servers. Every time a user registers, it validates the user's IP and what ever else to the spam servers and has a score (i.e. username used as spammer = 1 point, email address used as spammer = 2 points, and ip address used as spammer = 3 points - or whatever) and you can then restrict users from completing registration based on the score received.

This worked really well, and I basically never got any spam registrations on IPB. However, being back on VB for a week, I'm being overrun by spam registrations and spam posts.

I use the delete posts as spam feature, which deletes the posts and bans the user, but that doesn't stop them from just creating a new account and posting again. I got to the point where I'm banning 10 bots every day as spam bots.

I installed project honey pot now, which uses the bad behavior mod and the project honeypot database, but my users are being flagged as spammers now, and they're being prevented from posting on my forums. I'm going to try the stopforumspam mod (both of these are on vb.org) now, but our sister board is having problems with users not being able to register, even though they're not spam bots.

I think it's really a big priority to actively work on a spam prevention method that will effectively block spam bots from registering and not posting crap all over the forums.

I hope now that I didn't type this post only to get post number 2 in this thread tell me that I'm an idiot and that I should just enable something somewhere to stop these (will feel really stupid), but I cannot see how I missed such a setting.

How are other boards handling this?