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[Vhab]

When dealing with spammers, just delete (and select the delete posts and threads option) the account.
Overall this just gets rid of them and their posts and doesn't fill the ban database with throw-away e-mail addresses and proxies.
The delete option is one of the bottom links on their profile page.

End of service message

[Neo-Vortex]

That said, In the past I've found a shittonne of accounts registered from a smallish IP range (especially ones that belonged to data centers/etc that end users are unlikely to be on), or from a particular sus-looking domain and have banned those (There's one entry with all of my spammer-related bans). So if banning a tonne at once, might be worth double checking if its all from the same source.

Edit: Don't we have an admin section or something?

[Xyphos]

A few pointers on Anti-Spam combat:

www.xyphos.com hasn't had any spammers dispite the fact that there is no verification requirement enforced.
the reason for this is a small mod I made to the forum's registration process, since most spam comes from bots.

First, I changed the variable name of the anti-spam captcha input field.
while captchas do detur some spam, the advanced bots will crack them easy.
however, most bots also have forum registration variables hardcoded and don't have support to dynamically change them.
so when a bot tries to register, it'll fail the captcha right off the bat, even if the captcha is cracked.

Second, in case the first fails, I added a new "hidden" registration var to the form and gave it a dummy value.
this dummy value is then altered to the correct value via javascript, since most bots are hardcoded and don't use javascript at all.
this allows for browser-users to register just fine with javascript enabled.

[veremit]

You could, of course, install some of the Mods on the vhabot SMF site that make new registrations more difficult for spam-bots