I was reading up how how to deal with the spamming bots, and came across this.

After cleaning out another round of spam registrations from our forums, I decided to make a subtle change to the worst-hit boards to screw up the "registration bots" used for this. In some cases, you can not take advantage of v2.0.11's "visual confirmation", which also stops the bots, but this should work.

It is a simple fix, but I will not post it as a regular MOD, because customization is the key here. The RegBots work by going directly to the submission of the form information, bypassing the various agreement screens by simply setting "agreed=true". Fortunately, web form variables are CasE-sEnsiTivE, so simply changing the all-lower-case name "agreed" to mixed-case will still allow manual registrations to work, but will simply present a bot's request with the COPPA form, and not make any entries into your users table.

The affected files are:

admin/admin_users.php
includes/usercp_avatar.php
includes/usercp_register.php

With a text editor, search for "agreed", and replace it with your own choice of mixed case, or even something like "IAmInAgreement". As long as all references to this variable are identical, registration and profile changes work as before... except for those trying to bypass the system.

Cool. Pretty simple, but will it be used? That is the question.

or change it to turdrockets=true

that would require access to the code of the bots being used

I remember the old boards where we didn't have to deal with man eating porno robots

...

Who doesn't?

why did you not quote man eating porno robots. That was the best part.