Regarding spam bots
Poor tile, I'll be seeing him on moddb for a while. 
Portal Dreams Mod... It's going to be refreshing, Like lemonade... Mmmm don't make me thirsty,
Ok this is ridiculous.
Laakkone pointed me to the forum today and I cleared out over 60 spam threads that were posted in just one day.
Didn't even move em to the trash - just ticked the posts and deleted them from the 'moderate forum' area.
of all that is sane: please put better spam protections msleeper!
The problem isn't just spambots posting spam, some bots register and just sit there with a link in their user profile. Google finds this link and thinks its more popular.
memberlist.php?g=230&mode=group&start=6475
MSleeper, can you add a column displaying whether or not that user is banned on that list? it would be helpful to look down the list and be able to quickly spot spam bots, and just ban them right away, but I dont want to be re-banning accounts
I'm not sure if we have it here or not, but verify email before you can use your account?
Also, this looks like a reasource that may be able to help. I found it by doing a websearch of one of the IPs of one of the spammers
http://www.stopforumspam.com/
Edit:
Just did a permma ban on everyone who joined the last week, except for people who were posting non-spam, or logged back in after sign up date.
I think we need to delete these spambot users though, or atleast cleanse their public data, because they are still propagating their spam on their user profiles.
list of the damned banned
Edit:
New idea... maybe stupid, maybe not
We could move the register page to a new address or php command.
If it is a bot, then it will break as it wont have the right page.
If it is a human, they probably have the page bookmarked, and they'll not find the page when they go to the bookmark.
At this point you could determine that whoever travels to the old register page is probably a spammer, you could record their IP, or temporarily block it. In-case it is a human who then navigates to the proper register page.
This wouldn't affect any current users.
Edit: more mass banning
EDIT: snip, moved to a pm
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Im blue, a Clean Christian Furry with Autism.
sorry for bumping a spam thread, but i just was thinking: maybe, to verify for absolute sure that sombody doesnt join unless they are a human who belongs here, the sign-up process should require the user to answer one of these three obvious, yet relevant,questions. then the account isnt activated unless an admin approves the answer. so even if it's humans who create the account for their spam bots to use, they still cant get in, because they wouldn't know the right answer.
Who is the main antagonist of our favorite game here?
[user input box here]
What is hammer?
[user input box here]
what character in the third game has brown eyes?
[user input box here]
notice that it doesn't say which game. spammers probably cant figure out what game this site is for. the third game thing is also another trap; a spammer would try to answer cleverly like "oh, well, you know! it's her. 
" a legit user would say, "valve cant count to three..."
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Im blue, a Clean Christian Furry with Autism.
Re: manually graded signup quiz - Spambots create more work for the admins, let's solve the problem by creating more work for the admins ! Yay
A solution I've seen on other places is just deleting all a user's URL tags until they reach a small number of posts. Spammers exist to post links, and if we take that away, what's the point.
A solution I've seen on other places is just deleting all a user's URL tags until they reach a small number of posts. Spammers exist to post links, and if we take that away, what's the point.
first paragraph: good point...
second pragraph: what about all the real users who post url tags here literally all the time?
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Im blue, a Clean Christian Furry with Autism.
BenVlodgi brought up a good point that the spam bots post links inside their profile - these literally cannot be changed by moderators (msleeper most probably). It still comes up through Google bot search even though their account is banned.
Manual signup quiz is just annoying, they should be generic one word or phrase answers that is portal specific. A computer spambot isn't smart enough to Google answers and most of the human spammers probably don't get paid enough to be bothered.
Also keep in mind that not everyone that signs up to this forum actually use hammer. They might just like to play custom Portal maps or post feedback.
The phpBB forums do have a fair amount of anti-spam discussion, for example this thread, though I'm sure you guys have looked there before.
What I took from it is that the current captcha system used here, reCAPTCHA, can be broken by bots - so we need to find out another method. My 2 cents on the issue is that Q&A is the best way to go. Or, admin approval maybe? I'm not sure about the traffic here so I don't know how practical that would be; and I think msleeper wants the site to not require constant babysitting. Plus discerning a spammer from a non-spammer could be hard, unless there was some giveaway in the registration fields that would help distinguish bots.
You're right - and on the forum where I stole this idea from, that's an issue. The trick is to set the number of posts really low, like five posts or so. Most spammers sign up, post once, and go away forever. It's just a minor annoyance for anyone else, because they can just post four more times.