How do you stop spammers? from posting...

I run a pretty established guild www.ninjaschool.org But recently I have had to lock my forums untill I grant people access to post. This is because I am getting super spammers... I trace the IP and them all come from asia... I even traced one IP that was coming from a SCHOOL! It does not matter if i ban them they keep coming. Have any other popular guilds have this happen to them? I am tired of deleting 10+ posts a day by spammers in my forums.

How does guru or gwonline disrupt this threat? My forums are phpbb. If anyone could shed some insight on how to counter this with out having to lock down my forums please let me know or PM me thanks

Thanks for your time.
Dallus

Making it so users must register in order to post on the forums in all of the sections and subsections is a good start. Another option is to make it so you must manually grant permission to users to post, possibly do this by setting up a usergroup that anyone is free to join or you can put them there manually. Ban all non-standard e-mail addresses such as @biz, @org, etc, etc. Doing the previous step I brought down the number of bots that registered on our forums from 5-10 daily to 1-none daily.

Note: We use phpbb as well.

Hope some of that helps.

phpbb security sucks...

spambots generate around this, they register and their script allows them to login without email authentication..
We've also tried visual verification upon registration.. or a secret question.. but these things don't help either.

Which results in the admin getting a spambox (or inbox) filled with forum applications. If a new registered user is not a spambot, he'd have to send the admin a PM for verification.

Our banlist is huuuuge and still bots can get through

You may want to look into board hack/mods that will adjust posting requirements, such as setting a limit of account age, or amount of prior posts before being able to use features of your board, such as inserting text links.

Ad spammers tend to do their work surgically, registering, posting, and leaving, and making it inconvenient/slow to do so, without overly burdening your own regular posters, can help aid in significant drops in ad spam.

Not really at all familiar with phpbb though.