Thanks for the suggestion. We already have the type of defense against bots that you mention, and you would have gone through it when you joined the forum. However these new spams are not by bots, they are by liveware, i.e. some guy sitting at a computer in India. This guy is signing up as a new member and leaving three posts every day, each day from a new IP address. I'm sure he has been given a list of a few hundred forums that he is supposed to do this on every morning and imagine that he will soon realize that the person he works for would replace him with a piece of software in a heartbeat if he could. It's got to be a pretty dreary existence. I hope for him that he will eventually find a job that gives him a little self respect.