Anti-Spam measures bulked up

We have a few user registration based sites out there. These sites (as well as contact type forms) are suseptable to spam posts from foreign and even sometimes domestic IP addresses.

We used to rely on reCaptcha to stop the majority of this, but within the last few months that has become less reliable, despite being a valuable tool still.

One variable we've always tracked for user based websites is IP address. It helps us locate spammers when they make it through.

I've found a free resource online called Stop Forum Spam that is a community contributed XML API that we can check user IPs against to avoid spam registrations. This is a real-time growing list and should prove to be very valuable in the fight against worthless spam users & posts.

So in the near future we're going to go back through some of the more high traffic user website's we've released and add in this preventative measure for the registration process. It should drastically improve the anti-spam efforts within the site's code.