I voted no. I guarantee this idea will backfire in a big way. How do I know this? I run my own forum as well. Look at the member list on my forum in descending order, what do you notice? That's right, not ONE spam account, and not one has been posted successfully since mid January. revolve-trans.org alone receives around 9000-11000 hits an hour, and with that many hits, spam bots are sure to follow.
The first key to understanding how to fight spam is to understand why spammers post. Even with out posting in forum threads, spammers have a lot to gain by creating users and only posting in their forum profile. The reason spammers do this is to elevate their sites ranking on google. Doing this insures that even more people will go to their spam site via google so they can make more money. Armed with these basic facts now, its time to fight spam!
Now, I want you to understand why I voted no. The biggest problem I am having right now is the aftermath of the measures I took against spam before implementing a few mods to the forum. The first was to create a "newb central" where all newbs had to post their first post to basically prove they weren't a spam bot account. As you can see from a few of the comments in response, that wasn't too well received. I've done away with the section since creating this new story, trying to figure out what people don't like about my forum.
Back in December of 2006, I was fed up with spam bots. I was removing between 35-40 a day! Something else had to be done; manual administration was out of the question now, even with two admins doing something about it. I knew one sure fire way to remove spam accounts was to install an OPM or "Open Proxy Monitor." We had moved to an IRC server with one of these on it, and it stopped people from banning evading and spamming our chat room completely. So, I found a really awesome OPM for phpBB. Cut the spam bot count down by about 5-8 a day. Not quite the massive number I was expecting, but it is averaging around 40 a week at the current time (since retweaking what ports are scanned for Open Proxies). Something else had to be done.
I looked on phpBB.com's forums for awhile, trying to find out what other admins where doing to stop spam on their forums. Low and behold I came across Anti-Spam ACP. Using this little mod gave the forum a few nifty features. The first was a new randomized series of captcha (aka the little numbers you enter on registration). This stops nearly all bots that target original phpBB installs. Then, it also gives you the option of disabling curtain fields on registration, such as signature, website address, and stuff like "AIM, ICQ, MSN etc" contact. These fields can be enabled for a users in their control panal after a fixed amount of post that you set, or never enabled at all! So bots that are scripted to send a website address and email are stopped dead in their tracks!
The key thing is to find similar mods that will accomplish the same things for Invision Power Board. I don't really have much time to find anything that might accomplish the same thing, but I hope I at least gave you enough of an idea of what you should look for. Between Anti-Spam ACP and OPM, 170 spam attempts have been blocked in the last week alone! That's an amazing number.
I'm warning you against your method so you won't make the same mistake I did at first. When you start rounding up users like that, it scares off users from coming to the forum and makes you look bad. That is how my users see my forum at this point, so now I got some real fences to mend. This forum is more active then mine, so try your best to keep it that way, okay? lol
